West risks a Third World War unless it improves weapons, says ex-Ukraine army chief
Western powers must “wake up” and urgently prioritise the development of new military technology or risk World War Three, the former commander of Ukraine’s armed forces has said.
Good afternoon, time for our weekend war briefing on day 886. Also follow our graphic Ukraine war video thread here.
An oil depot was burning in Polevaya, Kursk oblast, Russia on Sunday morning after a reported Ukrainian drone strike. The Russian Telegram channel Baza said three tanks caught fire and posted video. Nasa’s satellite fire monitoring service, Firms, showed heat signatures from fires at the location of an oil refinery in Polevaya. The acting regional governor, Alexei Smirnov, confirmed the attack, saying 82 firefighters and 32 units of equipment were involved in trying to put out the fires.
Russia’s defence ministry said its forces had taken control of the settlement of Lozuvatske in the Donetsk region of Ukraine, Interfax news agency reported, as the Russians advanced towards the city of Pokrovsk. US-based thinktank the Instiute for the Study of War (ISW) said this claim was “consistent with ISW’s assessment of Russian advances in the area”. Ukraine’s general staff made no mention of the settlement in its reports, but noted that the area around it was gripped by heavy fighting. Unofficial military bloggers have reported the loss of at least two other localities in the sector. Russian forces have been slowly advancing through the Donetsk region in Ukraine’s east.
The ISW said Ukrainian forces advanced on Saturday within Vovchansk, north-east of Kharkiv city, amid continued Russian ground attacks. In Donetsk oblast, geolocated footage indicated Ukraine regained lost positions in northern Pivdenne, south-east of Toretsk, the ISW said; while Russian forces advanced west and south-west of Donetsk city, and were filmed raising their flag in northern Krasnohorivka, west of the city. “Geolocated published on July 27 indicates that Russian forces advanced further south of Kostyantynivka (south-west of Donetsk city) during the roughly reinforced battalion-size mechanized assault that Russian forces conducted in the area on July 24,” the ISW added.
Ukrainian attack drones damaged a Russian Tu-22M3 strategic bomber at a military airfield in northern Russia, a military intelligence source told Reuters on Saturday. The source said a long-range TU-22M3 supersonic bomber was hit at the Olenya military airfield near Olenegorsk in northern Russia, about 1,800km (1,100 miles) from the Ukrainian border. Ukrainian media outlet Ukrainska Pravda reported that in further attacks on Russia, military airfield were hit in the city of Engels in the Saratov region and Dyagilevo in the Ryazan region. A drone also hit an oil refinery in Ryazan. Reuters could not independently confirm the reports.
Ukrainian officials say Russian shelling killed at least five civilians on Saturday in separate regions of Ukraine. In the Kherson region, in Ukraine’s south, officials said three people were killed, while in the north-eastern Sumy region a 14-year-old boy was killed and 12 other people wounded in a rocket attack on the small town of Hlukhiv, the Ukraine prosecutor’s office said. The attack on the town near the Russian border hit apartment blocks, houses, an educational institution, a shop and vehicles just after noon. Six of the wounded were children. In Kharkiv region, the governor, Oleh Syniehubov, said one person was killed when a private home near the city of Chuhuiv came under fire.
In southern Russia’s Belgorod region, the regional governor, Vyacheslav Gladkov, said Ukrainian shelling and drone attacks killed one person, injured two and damaged homes and other buildings. Russia’s defence ministry said air defence units had destroyed two drones over the region late on Saturday. Accounts from either side could not be independently confirmed. Ukraine denies attacking civilian targets inside Russia.
China’s foreign minister told his US counterpart that Beijing denies charges it is helping Russia’s war effort in Ukraine. Wang Yi met with Antony Blinken, the US secretary of state, on Saturday on the sidelines of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (Asean) in Vientiane, the capital of Laos. Blinken discussed China’s support for Russia’s defence industrial base and warned of further US actions if China does not curtail that, according to a senior US state department official. “There was no commitment by the Chinese to take action,” the official told Reuters.
The Ukrainian maritime corridor transported 60m tonnes of cargo, mainly from the Greater Odesa ports, in the last 11 months, the Ukrainian seaports authority said, despite attacks on port infrastructure. 40.6m tonnes of this total amount were grain exports delivered to 46 countries.
India’s prime minister, Narendra Modi, is scheduled to travel to Kyiv in August, marking his first visit to Ukraine since Russia launched its full-scale invasion two years ago.
The air force of the armed forces of Ukraine said Russia has increased the number of “ballistic” strikes over the past few months, forcing Ukrainian forces to think more about “passive defence” tactics such as camouflage and using “false positions”.
The governor of the Bryansk region in southern Russia, Alexander Bogomaz, reported a “massive” drone attack on the region. No casualties were reported. “22 unmanned aircraft-type aerial vehicles have been intercepted and destroyed,” Bogomaz wrote on Telegram.
Ukraine’s Gamble in Russia has yet to Slow Moscow’s Eastern Assault
A Ukrainian drone unit commander, right, stands in Ukrainian-held territory in Russia's Kursk region on Aug. 18.
August 30, 2024. More than three weeks into the plan by Ukraine’s military chief to turn the tide of the war by sending troops into Russia, much looks as if it’s proceeding as intended — except that Russians are still advancing inside Ukraine.
Russia’s offensive continues even with hundreds of its soldiers in Ukrainian prisons and hundreds of square miles of its sovereign territory under Ukrainian control.
If the bold plan by Kyiv’s Gen. Oleksandr Syrsky fails, Ukraine could lose many well-trained soldiers and much of the foreign equipment it has deployed to Kursk, as well as land in its own east, where Russian troops — who far outnumber Ukraine’s — persist in their grinding assault on the key transit hub of Pokrovsk.
Analysts say it is not at all clear what the end game is — or if Syrsky’s gamble will pay off.
Nico Lange, a former German defense official who is now a fellow at the Center for European Policy Analysis, noted that the incursion into Russia gave Ukraine “tangible gains,” including prisoners of war and a much-needed morale boost. But Russian President Vladimir Putin is downplaying the incursion and keeping the focus on Ukraine’s east.
“He’s basically telling the Ukrainians: ‘You can stay, you can leave — do what you want. For now I will be busy with other things,’” he said. If Ukraine’s goal was to exchange land for land, Lange added, “it’s clearly not working and Putin is calling it.”
“There is an asymmetry: The territory that is lost now in Donbas — Russia will keep it. But Ukraine cannot keep Kursk, and Putin knows it,” he said.
In a rare news conference this week, both Syrsky and President Volodymyr Zelensky acknowledged that the Pokrovsk front remains the most difficult in the war. “Their goals have not changed,” Zelensky said of Russia’s intention to seize all of the Donetsk region, which is in the area known as Donbas. Syrsky noted that 30,000 Russian troops have been moved to respond in Kursk, but not from Donetsk. In recent days, throngs of terrified Ukrainian civilians have fled Pokrovsk and surrounding villages as Russian forces advance and troops prepare for potential street battles in the city.
Russia had been planning to launch a new attack on Ukraine from the Kursk region before Kyiv’s surprise cross-border incursion, Ukraine’s Commander-in-Chief Gen. Oleksandr Syrskyi told CNN in an exclusive interview Thursday.
In his first television interview since becoming military chief in February, the general told CNN’s Christiane Amanpour that he believed the Kursk operation had been a success.
Ukraine’s prosecutor general, Andriy Kostin, has resigned after dozens of his officials allegedly had themselves registered as disabled to avoid military service. “The prosecutor general must take political responsibility for the situation in the prosecution bodies of Ukraine,” Volodymyr Zelenskyy, announced after a security council meeting about cracking down on draft dodging. Kostin minutes later called the situation “clearly amoral” and agreed with Ukraine’s president that “it is right to announce my resignation from the position of prosecutor general”. Ukraine’s domestic security service, the SBU, said on Tuesday that 64 members of medical commissions had been named as suspects in criminal investigations in 2024, and nine more had been tried and found guilty.
“It is not only prosecutors, by the way,” Zelenskyy said in his evening address. “There are hundreds of cases of obviously unjustified disability [statuses] among customs and tax officials, in the pension fund system, and in local administrations … All this must be dealt with carefully and promptly.” After the security council meeting, the prime minister, Denys Shmyhal, dismissed the management of the central commission overseeing fitness for service, and senior officials in related roles in the health ministry. Zelenskyy ordered his cabinet to urgently draft a law dissolving existing medical commissions and reforming the disability assessment system.
It came as Ukrainian officials said a man wanted for evading a military call-up killed himself after being caught by police and taken to an army recruitment centre in the central city of Poltava. “He refused to undergo a military medical examination,” the recruitment centre said, and his body was found in one of the centre’s “technical rooms” showing “obvious signs” of suicide. An investigation into the circumstances of his death was opened. Mobilisation is a sensitive subject in Ukraine. Most working-age men are barred from leaving the country and those aged 25 and over are subject to being called up to fight.
Ukrainian military intelligence expects North Korean soldiersto start turning up on Wednesday in Russia’s southern Kursk region. “We are waiting for the first units tomorrow in the Kursk direction,” Lt Gen Kyrylo Budanov, head of the HUR intelligence directorate, told US publication The War Zone on Tuesday. “It is unclear at the moment how many or how they will be equipped. We will see after a couple of days.” In Seoul, a senior official in the office of the president said South Korea may consider directly supplying weapons to Ukraine as part of measures to counter military ties between North Korea and Russia, Pjotr Sauer writes.
The deployment of North Korean troops in Ukraine would be a sign of Russian desperation, Finland’s president, Alexander Stubb, said on Tuesday. “It relies on Iranian weapons, it relies on North Korean soldiers. How much worse can it get?” he said. Stubb, who will make a state visit to China next week, said he would tell its president, Xi Jinping, there could be no peace deal without Ukraine’s involvement, and urge China not to support Russia in any way, “especially not with dual use materials and goods that can be used for weapons”.
The UN secretary general, António Guterres, will meet Vladimir Putin on Thursday, his office has confirmed, after news of the visit was slammed by Ukraine’s foreign ministry, as Patrick Wintour writes. Guterres’s deputy spokesman, Farhan Haq, told reporters the UN chief planned to meet with a “large number” of leaders in Kazan for the Brics summit. Asked about talks with Putin, he said Guterres would “reaffirm his well-known positions” on the Ukraine conflict and outline “the conditions for just peace”. Guterres’s decision has infuriated many in the west since the international criminal court issued warrants for Putin’s arrest in March 2023 related to the Ukraine war.
Russian forces advanced over a key waterway in the eastern Ukrainian stronghold of Chasiv Yar, a Ukrainian military official said, marking a setback for the defenders. Chasiv Yar sits on a strategic hilltop and its capture could speed up Russian advances in the Donetsk region. However, the official added: “The enemy managed to break into our line of defence, but there is no critical failure and we are not about to lose Chasiv Yar. Fierce fighting continues now.”
Russian attacks with drones and artillery hit residential buildings, killing five people including a child, in the eastern Ukrainian regions of Sumy and Donetsk, officials said on Tuesday. Separately, emergency services in the eastern Donetsk region said two people had been killed and another wounded by Russian shelling on the town of Myrnograd. Moscow’s defence ministry claimed its latest advances in the region on Tuesday, saying its forces had captured the abandoned frontline settlement of Novosadove in the Donetsk region. In occupied southern Ukraine, Russian-installed officials said a Ukrainian drone attack on the town of Enerhodar, home to the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant, killed one person.
The Russian war has driven down Ukraine’s population by around eight million by sparking an exodus and sending birthrates plunging, the UN population fund said on Tuesday. “Overall, Ukraine’s population has declined by an estimated 10 million since 2014 and by an estimated eight million since the beginning of the full-scale invasion in 2022,” said the fund’s regional director covering Ukraine, Florence Bauer.
The US plans to contribute $20bn to a G7 loan package for Ukraine of $50bn and could soon announce new sanctions targeting Russian weapons procurement, the treasury secretary, Janet Yellen, said on Tuesday. The loan will be backed by profits from the interest on Russian assets frozen after Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. G7 leaders are due to meet about it later this week. “What I want to emphasise is that the source of financing for these loans – this is not the American taxpayer,” Yellen said. She continued: “We will unveil strong new sanctions targeting those facilitating the Kremlin’s war machine, including intermediaries in third countries that are supplying Russia with critical inputs for its military.
Whoever wins the US election, the start of a new administration should be an opportunity for a serious reevaluation of US policy toward the war in Ukraine. For it is abundantly clear that the present course is unsustainable, and if persisted in, is likely to lead sooner or later either to Ukrainian collapse or to direct NATO involvement in war with Russia. This is indeed now tacitly admitted by some US commentators like Robert Kagan, though he has not been willing to tell Americans that they must go to war in order to prevent Ukrainian defeat or a compromise peace.
www.telegraph.co.uk
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