Ukraine-Russia latest: Brazil urged to arrest Putin as Zelensky issues new North Korea warning

Russia has claimed it captured a small village in southern Ukraine as it probes for weaknesses along the war’s roughly 1,000km (600 mile) front line.

Levadne is a tiny settlement in Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhia region, southwest of the Donetsk region where Russia has concentrated the bulk of its recent offensive operations.

Eastern areas of Ukraine are currently are the main focus of Moscow’s military effort before winter arrives.

In Moscow, the defence ministry said Russian troops took Levadne in the Zaporizhzhia region. Levadne was seized by the Russians early during the war but was recaptured by Ukrainian forces during a counteroffensive in the summer of 2023.

A French citizen was sentenced to three years in prison after being convicted in a Russian court of collecting military information.

Laurent Vinatier was arrested in Moscow in June and previously admitted failing to register as a “foreign agent” before gathering information on the Russian army.

In his remarks, Vinatier stated that he recognised guilt and asked the judge for clemency, saying in Russian: “I’m asking the Russian Federation to forgive me for failing to observe Russian laws.”

His lawyers asked the court to sentence him to a fine in the trial, which was fast-tracked following Vinatier’s guilty plea.

Vinatier’s arrest came as tensions rose between Paris and Moscow, after French president Emmanuel Macron raised the possibility of deploying French troops in Ukraine.

Ukraine’s military says its defence forces shot down 12 Russian drones overnight.

Russian forces fired 17 drones, seven S-300/400 anti-aircraft guided missiles from Crimea and two Kh-59 guided air missiles against Chernihiv region and Sumy region from Kursk, the Ukraine Air Force said on Telegram this morning.

“As a result of anti-aircraft combat, 12 enemy UAVs were shot down in the Mykolaiv, Kyiv, Odesa, Poltava, Chernihiv, Kirovohrad and Cherkasy regions,” it said.

Military recruiters in Ukraine hunted down men for conscription in targeted raids at restaurants, shopping centres and a rock concert over the weekend, videos show. Kyiv has stepped up efforts to conscript men into the military ahead of a winter battle with the Russian forces.

The recruiters were seeing forcibly pulling a young man towards a recruitment desk who kept shouting “get away from me!” outside the Palace of Sports in Kyiv. He had gone to attend rock band Okean Elzy’s performance.

People present on the spot captured the incident on their phones and shouted “Shame! Shame on you!” at the recruiters.

According to the eyewitnesses, police checked all the men’s documents and those who refused to show or whose documents were not eligible, were dragged away.

Local reports said raids were also conducted in clubs and restaurants across other Ukrainian cities, including Kharkiv and Dnipro in eastern and central Ukraine.

Ukraine has intensified its conscription drive this year. A new law came into effect this spring stipulating that those eligible for military service must input their information into an online system or face penalties.

Russian president Vladimir Putin may attend the G20 summit in Brazil next month, Ukraine’s top prosecutor has said.

Ukrainian prosecutor general Andriy Kostin told Reuters he had called on Brazilian authorities to carry out Putin’s arrest warrant from the International Criminal Court if he landed on South American soil.

The arrest warrant was issued for Putin in March 2023, around a year after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. He is accused of the war crime of deporting children.

Russia has dismissed the warrant as “null and void”, denying allegations of war crimes.

Kostin said he had “information that Putin may attend the G20 summit in Brazil” and reminded Brazil “it’s an obligation for the Brazilian authorities as a state party of the Rome Statute to arrest him if he dares to visit”.

Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov was asked on Monday whether a decision had been made on whether Putin would attend the meeting of the world’s leading 20 economies. He said: “No. When a decision is made, we will let you know.”

Russian forces are using illicit Starlink terminals to dramatically improve their fighting capability on the battlefield despite US sanctions aimed at curbing this technology, Ukrainian soldiers on the frontline have reported.

The terminals, which provide live battlefield views via drones and secure communications, have proliferated on the black market, reaching Russian troops on the front lines and contributing to their recent gains.

The Ukrainian military has heavily relied on tens of thousands of Starlink dishes to support its operations, leveraging the satellite internet for digital warfare.

Ukraine has already procured and supplied one million drones to the front, Volodymyr Zelensky said in his nightly address.

“And this is only from the state. There are also supplies from volunteers,” he said yesterday.

A Russian first-person view (FPV) drone attack in the Kherson region has killed two women in their car, Ukraine’s Interior Ministry said.

The strike hit near the town of Beryslav, 75 kilometres east of Kherson city, according to the regional prosecutor’s office.

Kherson was freed from Russian occupation in November 2022, and has since been the subject of sustained and regular attacks from Russian troops.

Residents of the southern city have reported an increase in indiscriminate Rusian attacks with FPV drones on civilian targets in the city. They refer th the new strategy as “human safari”, The Kyiv Independent reported.

Ukrainian and Russian forces have clashed 189 times on the frontline in the past 24 hours, military officials said.

The fighting is most intense on the Kurakhove, Pokrovsk and Lyman fronts, the General Staff of the Ukraine Armed Forces said.

“Russian invaders launched a missile strike and 38 airstrikes on the territory of Ukraine, dropping 67 guided aerial bombs. In addition, they employed over 400 kamikaze drones and targeted the positions of our troops and populated areas over 2,250 times,” the military statement read.

Nato will not be cowed by Russian threats but keep up its strong support of Kyiv, secretary-general Mark Rutte said on his first visit to the alliance’s Ukraine mission in Wiesbaden, set to take over the coordination of military aid from the US

“The message (to Vladimir Putin) is that we will continue, that we will do what’s necessary to make sure that he will not get his way, that Ukraine will prevail,” he told Reuters in a joint interview with German public radio Hessischer Rundfunk yesterday.

Mr Rutte spoke at Clay Barracks, the US base hosting the headquarters of the new mission, dubbed Nato Security Assistance and Training for Ukraine (NSATU), which will gradually assume the coordination of Western military aid to Kyiv.

The Nato chief, who was prime minister of the Netherlands from 2010 until 2024, said it was crucial for Nato to have the full range of capabilities needed to deter a Russian threat.

“We are Nato. We are a defensive alliance, we are not offensive. We are not interested in capturing any part of any other country outside Nato territory,” he said.