Ukraine-Russia war latest: Putin’s troops disguised as Ukrainians in assault on key city

Hungary’s Viktor Orban has claimed that the European Union needs to reconsider sanctions against Russia which are keeping energy prices elevated, hindering the bloc’s economic competitiveness.

European Union leaders signed a declaration on competitiveness at their informal summit last week.

But Mr Orban – the EU leader most closely aligned with Vladimir Putin, and a vocal critic of military aid to Kyiv – said US companies pay a quarter of the amount their European counterparts spend on gas and electricity, a disadvantage that he said could not be overcome by other means.

While countries in western Europe have made serious efforts to wean themselves off Russian energy, landlocked Hungary gets 80 to 85 per cent of its gas from Russia, with 80 per cent of its crude oil supplies also coming from its former communist ally.

“Energy prices need to be lowered by all means,” Mr Orban told Hungarian broadcasters. “This means that sanctions need to be reconsidered because under the current sanctions policy, energy prices will not go lower.”

Donald Trump has said his administration would focus on ending Russia’s war against Ukraine.

“We’re going to work very hard on Russia and Ukraine. It’s gotta stop. Russia and Ukraine’s gotta stop,” he said during an event in Florida.

The US president-elect expressed regret over the deaths caused by the war, “whether they’re soldiers or they’re people sitting in towns”. “We’re going to work it.”

During his campaign, Mr Trump repeatedly said he could quickly end the fighting in Ukraine but did not offer details of how he would accomplish that.

Ukraine says it has full control of a key city in the northeast of the country, after Russian troops – some disguised as Ukrainian soldiers – were said to have briefly breach its outskirts.

The Ukrainian military’s general staff wrote on the Telegram messenger app that the “alleged presence of Russian troops in the city of Kupiansk is not true”.

The comments came after it was reported that Russian troops had, in fact, entered the city in the Kharkiv region on Wednesday for the first time since they fled in September 2022. The city is an important railway hub with a pre-war population of 26,000.

Russian forces have breached the outskirts of Ukraine’s northeastern city Kupiansk, part of a region it briefly held after first invading Ukraine, military officials said.

Moscow’s forces attacked the region in four waves and used soldiers disguised as Ukrainian troops but were repelled from the city by Kyiv’s forces, Ukraine’s General Staff said. But why does the control of Kupiansk, a significant rail hub in the area, matter?

Kupiansk was captured by Russian forces in the early days of the February 2022 invasion and then liberated by Ukraine in a counteroffensive months later.

Vladimir Putin’s forces deployed 15 pieces of hardware in their assault on Kupiansk, including tanks and armoured vehicles, as they attempt to expand offensive operations on a sprawling more-than-1,000km front, Volodymyr Zelensky has said.

The Russian attack looked opportunistic and Kyiv appeared to have isolated and destroyed most of the Russian forces that penetrated the outskirts of Kupiansk, Pasi Paroinen, a military analyst with the Black Bird Group, said.

“However, a penetration like that certainly signals confusion and weakness in Ukrainian defences in that area, which could prompt the local Russian commanders to increase their efforts to squeeze or cut off the Ukrainian salient,” he added.

He said the coming days would likely indicate whether the Kremlin was going to react to this by ramping up attacks there further.

After months spent occupying a swathe of territory in Russia in the wake of a daring summer assault, Volodymyr Zelensky has claimed that Ukraine is now engaged against a force of 50,000 troops amassed by Vladimir Putin in the border Kursk region.

The Ukrainian incursion was the largest on Russian soil since the Second World War and succeeded in taking Moscow – and even Kyiv’s closest allies – by surprise.

But despite Ukrainian troops’ success in bedding into positions deep into Kursk, the offensive received a mixed reaction from analysts, with some questioning the wisdom of drawing vital defensive power away from the fight in Ukraine’s eastern Donbas region, where Mr Putin’s forces have been making steady, grinding gains for months.

Alex Croft and Tom Watling report:

A London-based exiled Russian television chef has been found dead in Serbia.

Alexei Zimin, 52, was an outspoken critic of Russian president Vladimir Putin’s Crimea annexation. He was found dead in a hotel room in Belgrade earlier this week, according to Russian media. He was travelling to the Serbian capital to promote his new book on Britain, entitled Anglomania.

According to the Serbian authorities, there were “no suspicious circumstances” in Zimin’s death. An autopsy and toxicology investigation was underway, according to BBC News.

Zimin spent his final years in exile in the UK and ran a cookery show on the Russian NTV channel. But the show was stopped after he issued anti-war messages on social media in the wake of Putin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.