Ukraine-Russia war latest: Putin launches mass drone attack on Kyiv as Briton captured fighting for Ukraine

British spies will seek to counter Russian cyberwarfare with a new laboratory for artificial intelligence, with a senior government minister warning that Russia will not “think twice” about targeting the UK.

Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster Pat McFadden will speak at the Nato cyber defence conference at Lancaster House on Monday night.

Vowing never to let Vladimir Putin deter the UK from supporting Ukraine, Mr McFadden will say the UK and its Nato allies are watching Moscow and combating its attacks both publicly and “behind the scenes”.

Russia’s air defence systems destroyed 39 Ukrainian drones overnight over seven regions, Russia’s defence ministry said this morning.

Of these, 24 drones were destroyed over the Rostov region in the southern part of Russia, the ministry said on its Telegram channel.

Russian forces have been advancing in Ukraine at their fastest pace since the early months of the war and have been exploiting vulnerabilities among Kyiv’s troops, analysts said yesterday.

“Russian forces recently have been advancing at a significantly quicker rate than they did in the entirety of 2023,” analysts at the Washington-based Institute for the Study of War said.

The report noted recent confirmed Russian battlefield gains near Vuhledar and Velyka Novosilka, which are in the Donetsk region in eastern Ukraine, and said Putin’s forces were moving into the strategic town of Kurakhove.

The Russian army captured almost 235sq km (91 square miles) in Ukraine over the past week, a weekly record for 2024, according to a report published by the independent Russian news group Agentstvo.

Agentstvo analysed data from Deep State, a group with close links to the Ukrainian army that studies combat footage and provides frontline maps.

“Russian forces’ advances in southeastern Ukraine are largely the result of the discovery and tactical exploitation of vulnerabilities in Ukraine’s lines,” analysts at the ISW said in their report.

In the summer of 2015, three Syrian girls who had narrowly survived an airstrike some weeks earlier stood before Tulsi Gabbard with horrific burns all over their bodies. Gabbard, then a US congresswoman on a visit to the Syria-Turkey border as part of her duties for the foreign affairs committee, had a question for them.

“How do you know it was Bashar al-Assad or Russia that bombed you, and not Isis?’” she asked, according to Mouaz Moustafa, a Syrian activist who was translating her conversation with the girls.

It was a revealing insight into Gabbard’s conspiratorial views of the conflict, and it shocked Moustafa to silence. He knew, as even the young children did, that Isis did not have jets to launch airstrikes. It was such an absurd question that he chose not to translate it because he didn’t want to upset the girls, the eldest of whom was 12.

“From that point on, I’m sorry to say I was inaccurate in my translations of anything she said,” Moustafa told The Independent. “It was more like: How do I get these girls away from this devil?”

Even before Gabbard left the Democratic Party, ingratiated herself with Donald Trump and secured his nomination to become director of National Intelligence, she was known as a prolific peddler of Russian propaganda.

In almost every foreign conflict in which Russia had a hand, Gabbard backed Moscow and railed against the US. Her past promotion of Kremlin propaganda has provoked significant opposition on both sides of the aisle to her nomination.

My colleagues Richard Hall and Andrew Feinberg have more analysis here:

Ukrainian boxing icon Wladimir Klitschko has slammed American podcast host Joe Rogan for promoting Russian propaganda.

“You talk about sending American weapons to Ukraine which you believe will lead to the Third World War. Putin’s Russia is in trouble, so Putin wants to scare you and people like you. His war was supposed to last three days. It lasted three years thanks to the heroism and sacrifice of Ukrainians,” the former heavyweight champion Klitschko said on X.

His remarks come after Rogan on Friday criticised president Joe Biden’s decision to allow Ukraine to strike Russia with US-supplied long-range missiles, which he claimed will start a Third World War.

Mr Klitschko has also dared Rogan to invite him on for a chat.

Russia’s military captured a British national fighting with Ukrainian troops who have occupied part of Russia’s Kursk region, according to reports yesterday. The Briton was identified by state news agency Tass and other media as James Scott Rhys Anderson.

Tass quoted him as 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 three-year-old war against its neighbour.

His capture would mark one of the first known cases of a Western national being captured on Russian soil while fighting for Ukraine.

Vladimir Putin has signed a bill into law banning the adoption of Russian children by citizens of countries where gender transitioning is legal.

The Kremlin leader also approved legislation that outlaws the spread of material that encourages people not to have children.

The bills, which were previously approved by both houses of Russia’s parliament, follow a series of laws that have suppressed sexual minorities and bolstered so-called traditional values.

The US has seen no signs of North Korean troops inside Russian-occupied parts of Ukraine or that they are heading in that direction, the Pentagon said.

Sabrina Singh, a spokesperson for the Pentagon, told a briefing that the US Department of Defense does not “have any indications that there are DPRK soldiers in Ukraine,” referring to North Korea’s official name of Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.

“Don’t have any indications that there are DPRK soldiers in Ukraine. What we’ve said is that, you know, what we’re seeing is that they’re positioned around the Kursk region, but you know, not moving into Ukraine at the moment,” she said last night.

Europeans will step up military support for Ukraine, Germany’s defence minister pledged after talks with his British, French, Italian and Polish counterparts on how to foster defence efforts as Donald Trump is set to return to the White House.

“Our target must be to enable Ukraine to act out of a position of strength,” Boris Pistorius told reporters in Berlin after hosting a meeting of the Group of Five leading nations in European defence.

His remarks were echoed by the Polish defence minister Wladyslaw Kosiniak-Kamysz who vowed to pledge more aid for Kyiv.

“Europe must coordinate its efforts more, it must harmonise its actions, it must aim higher, in order also to be a good partner for the United States,” he said.

“We are obliged today to say it clearly – Europe must increase its efforts when it comes to helping Ukraine but above all... when it comes to its own security. Without higher spending, without awareness in every European society of the times we are living in, everything is nothing,” he said.

The election of Mr Trump – who is sceptical of US support for Ukraine – has added pressure on Europe to step up its role in arming Kyiv should Washington, the biggest donor so far, reduce its aid.