Ukraine-Russia war live: Killed security chief at Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant was ‘collaborator’, Kyiv says

Vladimir Putin’s offensive in eastern Ukraine is likely to culminate in the coming months, a US-based think-tank has assessed.

“Russian forces do not have the available manpower and materiel to continue intensified offensive efforts indefinitely, however, and current Russian offensive operations in eastern Ukraine will likely culminate in the coming months, if not weeks, as Ukrainian officials and ISW have previously assessed,” the Institute for the Study of War said in its latest assessment.

Ukrainian forces, it said, also face serious operational challenges and constraints, which are providing Russian forces with opportunities to pursue tactically significant gains.

But the current Russian offensive, which was started in autumn last year, has not yielded operationally significant gains for Russian forces and only offered gradual tactical gains in specific sectors of the front, the ISW said.

Ukraine’s “effective defence in depth along the frontline” has caused Russia significant losses and prevent Mr Putin’s troops from making more rapid gains on the battlefield, it said.

Russia attacked Ukraine’s critical infrastructure with 19 drones overnight, the country’s air force said.

Air defences shot down nine drones with seven more likely impacted by electronic jamming, the Ukrainian air force said on Telegram, without saying what happened to the remaining three.

President Volodymyr Zelensky said he had visited the northern Sumy region, from where Ukraine launched a major incursion into the neighbouring Russian Kursk region in August.

“Today I started my trip to the Sumy region with a meeting with our soldiers who are fighting in the Kursk region, defending our border regions and the entire state,” he said on the Telegram messaging platform.

A court in Minsk sentenced a dozen individuals to prison terms of between two and 25 years for helping commit what Belarus has called an “act of terrorism” at a military airfield outside the capital last year.

A group of Belarusian anti-government activists said in February 2023 that they had blown up a sophisticated Russian military surveillance aircraft in a drone attack at the base.

Russia and Belarus dismissed the assertion as fake, with Belarusian state television publishing footage showing what it said was the undamaged Beriev A-50 surveillance craft.

Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko, a close ally of Kremlin leader Vladimir Putin, alleged at the time that Ukrainian security services and the U.S. Central Intelligence agency were behind the operation.

The main defendant, Ukrainian national Nikolai Shvets, was sentenced in absentia to 25 years in prison.

Former Nato chief Jens Stoltenberg has said he regrets the alliance did not provide military support to Ukraine earlier.

“If there’s anything I in a way regret and see much more clearly now is that we should have provided Ukraine with much more military support much earlier,” he told the Financial Times.

“I think we all have to admit, we should have given them more weapons pre-invasion. And we should have given them more advanced weapons, faster, after the invasion. I take my part of the responsibility.”

Mr Stoltenberg also said Nato had called Putin’s “bluff” after “crossing all those so-called red lines” the Russian President had put up.

Putin has constantly threatened Nato and Ukraine’s Western allies to not interfere with Russia’s invasion, often with nuclear threats.

France will supply 12 more Caesar self-propelled guns to Ukraine, the French Minister of the Armed Forces has announced.

“The increase in the production capacity of our defence industry allows us to support Ukraine,” Sébastien Lecornu said in a statement.

The self-propelled guns will be financed by Ukraine.