Ukraine-Russia war latest: Russians told not to travel to West as Putin could use new missile in ‘coming days’

Devastating human and material losses continue to mount, leaving Ukraine more vulnerable than at any time since the early days of the war.

As of 31 August, the UN Human Rights Monitoring Mission in Ukraine had documented at least 11,743 civilians killed and 24,614 wounded in Ukraine since the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion.

Ukrainian prosecutors have said 589 Ukrainian children had been killed by 15 November.

Western countries believe Russia has suffered far worse casualties than Ukraine, sometimes losing more than 1,000 soldiers killed per day during periods of intense fighting in the east.

But it is Ukraine, with around a third of Russia’s population, that is likely to be facing the more severe manpower shortages arising from battles of attrition.

Russia now occupies and claims to have annexed around a fifth of Ukraine, an area around the size of Greece.

The draft 2025 budget envisages that about 26% of Ukraine’s GDP, or 2.2 trillion hryvnias ($53.3 billion), would go on defence. Ukraine has already received more than $100 billion from its Western partners in financial aid.

There are several variants of Army Tactical Missile Systems, a long-range missile system that often carries varying amounts of cluster bomblets.

Ukrainian forces used the US-supplied long-range ATACMS missiles for the first time in October 2023, with President Volodymyr Zelenskiy saying the weapons had “proven themselves.”

Ukraine likely has what are known as M39A1 Block IA ATACMS that are guided in part by Global Positioning System and have a range of 40 to 190 miles. They can carry a payload of 300 bomblets. The M39 Block IA were used in Operation Iraqi Freedom, according to Army documents, and were added to the US arsenal in 1997.

Vladimir Putin said Russia had struck Ukraine with a new hypersonic medium-range ballistic missile in response to Kyiv’s use of US and British missiles against Russia.

On 21 November, he said Russia had launched an “Oreshnik”, one of its newest intermediate-range missiles, at a defence enterprise in the Ukrainian city of Dnipro.

Putin said it travelled at 10 times the speed of sound and could not be intercepted. It has a range of around 3,100 miles allowing Russia to strike most of Europe, according to experts.

It appears to have multiple independently targetable re-entry vehicles: separate warheads able to hit different targets.

Anatoly Matviychuk, a Russian military expert, said it could carry six to eight conventional or nuclear warheads, and was probably already in service.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has criticised Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban for his call with Russian leader Vladimir Putin to discuss Ukraine.

“No one should boost personal image at the expense of unity... There can be no discussions about the war that Russia wages against Ukraine without Ukraine,” he said on X.

The Kremlin said earlier on Wednesday that Putin had told Orban in a phone call that Kyiv’s policy continued to exclude the possibility of a peaceful settlement of the conflict. It did not say when the call took place.

Russia’s Defence Ministry said that Ukraine had attacked a military airfield in the southern Russian city of Taganrog with six US-supplied ATACMS missiles and promised retaliation.

The ministry said in a statement that all six missiles had been shot down or intercepted, but that falling missile debris had caused injuries among some personnel.

“There was no damage, two buildings on the technical territory of the airfield and three military vehicles, as well as civilian cars in the parking lot adjacent to the airfield were slightly damaged (by shrapnel),” the ministry said.

“This attack by Western long-range weapons will not go unanswered and appropriate measures will be taken,” it said.

President Vladimir Putin has said that Russia would develop artificial intelligence with BRICS partners and other countries, a bid to challenge the dominance of the United States in one of the most disruptive technologies of the 21st Century.

“I am confident that the international alliance of national associations and development institutes in the field of AI of BRICS countries and other interested states will give a significant boost to such cooperation,” Putin told an AI conference in Moscow.

“We will launch this alliance today,” he said.

Russia’s largest lender Sberbank said that the new AI Alliance Network would include national AI associations from China, ranked as one of the world’s top two AI powers, along with Russia, India, Brazil and South Africa, in a partnership.

Russian troops destroyed or captured several Ukrainian positions near the eastern city of Pokrovsk, Kyiv’s military has said, as Moscow bears down on the strategic logistics hub that is home to a unique Ukrainian coking mine.

After months of accelerating advances towards Pokrovsk, Moscow’s forces are now as close as 3 kilometres (1.9 miles) from the southern outskirts of the city, according to Ukraine‘s DeepState, which maps the front lines using open sources.

“As a result of prolonged clashes, two of our positions were destroyed, one was lost. Currently, measures are being taken to restore positions,” Nazar Voloshyn, Ukraine‘s military spokesman for the eastern front, said in televised comments.

Pokrovsk, situated about 18 kilometres (11 miles) from the boundary of Ukraine‘s Donetsk and Dnipropetrovsk regions, has for months been the area of the fiercest battles in Russia’s 33-month-old full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

In October and November, the Russian military advanced towards the city at its fastest rate since the early months of the war, analysts said. Ukraine, which has been on the back foot since its failed 2023 counteroffensive, says Russia has been sustaining some of its heaviest losses of the war to date.

Russia could launch another experimental hypersonic ballistic missile in Ukraine in coming days, but Washington does not consider the Oreshnik weapon a game changer in the war, a US official has said.

“We assess that the Oreshnik is not a game-changer on the battlefield, but rather just another attempt by Russia to terrorize Ukraine, which will fail,” the official told Reuters. Russia previously used the new weapon on the Ukrainian city of Dnipro, according to two senior Ukrainian government sources.