Ukraine-Russia war live: Anger in Moscow at Putin’s war spending as Russia closes in on key frontline city

Ukraine can produce four million drones annually and is quickly ramping up its production of other weapons, President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said in comments authorised for publication on Wednesday.

Speaking on Tuesday to executives from dozens of foreign arms manufacturers in Kyiv, Zelenskiy said Ukraine had already contracted to produce 1.5 million drones this year.

Drone production was virtually non-existent in Ukraine before Russia’s invasion in February 2022.

“In extremely difficult conditions of the full-scale war under constant Russian strikes, Ukrainians were able to build a virtually new defence industry,” said Zelenskiy.

Ukraine tripled its overall domestic weapons production in 2023 and then doubled that volume again in just the first eight months of this year, Prime Minister Denys Shmyhal told the same gathering. Ukrainian officials gave no absolute figures.

Russian troops have taken complete control of the eastern Ukrainian town of Vuhledar, a bastion that had resisted intense Russian attacks since the beginning of the 2022 war, Russian war bloggers and media said on Wednesday.

Russian Telegram channels published video of troops waving the Russian tricolour flag over shattered buildings. The town, which had a population of over 14,000 before the war, has been devastated, with Soviet-era apartment buildings smashed apart and scarred.

The Moskovsky Komsomolets newspaper said that Vuhledar had finally fallen after the last Ukrainian forces from the 72nd Mechanized Brigade, a unit famous for its resistance, abandoned the town late on Tuesday.

The Shot Telegram channel and pro-Russian war bloggers confirmed that Vuhledar was under total Russian control, though there was no official response from either the Russian or Ukrainian militaries.

The new Nato chief Mark Rutte has vowed to strengthen Western support for war-ravaged Ukraine as he takes charge of the alliance.

The former Dutch prime minister officially replaced Jens Stoltenberg on Tuesday as Nato secretary general after his predecessor spent a decade in the job.

Mr Rutte’s appointment comes at an important time for Nato, with the US election just weeks away, he will soon be working with a new president.

The secretary general said during a press conference on Tuesday that he could work with either Donald Trump or Kamala Harris and appreciates that Ukraine will be his top priority.

Russia’s security agency, the Federal Security Service (FSB), said it detained 39 individuals, including teenagers, accused of supporting “Ukrainian terrorist” groups.

The FSB accused the arrested individuals of “inciting children and adolescents to commit violent acts against representatives of state bodies, classmates and teachers”.

“Thirty-nine radicals aged 14 to 35, supporters of Ukrainian terrorist organizations banned in Russia, were detained,” the FSB said in a statement.

It claimed that nine teenagers were involved in planning “armed attacks on educational and religious institutions” in Russia.

It alleged that they were communicating with “Ukrainian handlers” online.

Ukraine’s forces took down 11 out of 32 Russian attack drones launched overnight, Ukraine‘s air force said today.

Another four drones left Ukrainian airspace in the direction of Russia and 10 drones were lost in northern and central Ukrainian regions as a result of electronic warfare countermeasures, it said.

Russian drones attacked the Ukrainian Izmail district near the Danube river in the southern Odesa region, local governor Oleh Kiper said on Telegram.

“The Russians targeted the port and border infrastructure,” Kiper said, adding that two lorry drivers, including a Turkish citizen, were injured.

He said the Ukrainian-Romanian crossing of Orlivka had temporarily suspended operations due to the shelling.

Vladimir Putin’s forces are in complete control of the strategic Ukrainian frontline town of Vuhledar, the SHOT Telegram channel and pro-Russian war bloggers said.

The Russian defence ministry has not yet claimed the town’s capture.

On Tuesday, a regional Ukrainian official said Russian troops had reached the town centre, a bastion on strategic high ground that has resisted Russian assaults for more than two years.

Images of Russian forces waving their flag on the roof of an administrative building on Tuesday in the town centre showed a structure which had been reduced to rubble in parts and whose blackened windows had all been blown out.

Vuhledar is a coal mining town that lies at the intersection of the eastern and southern battlefields, giving it added importance to supplying both sides’ troops.

Moscow has long sought to capture Vuhledar, which had a pre-war population of around 14,000, as a key stepping stone to incorporating the entire Donetsk region into Russia.

Vuhledar also sits close to a railway line connecting Crimea, the Black Sea peninsula which Russia annexed from Ukraine in 2014, to Ukraine’s industrialised Donbas region, which comprises Donetsk and the eastern region of Luhansk, most of which Moscow controls.

Vladimir Putin’s plans to boost its defence budget next year and prolong the war have drawn backlash from some quarters of the Russian public.

Russia is set to increase its spending on defence by 25 per cent next year, taking it to the highest level on record.

The newly proposed increase in spending will push Russia’s defence budget to a record 13.5 trillion rubles (£109bn) by 2025, according to draft budget documents released on Monday on the parliament’s website.

The spending on defence and security combined will account for 40 per cent of Russia’s total budget. Irina, a pensioner, called it an “outrage” and said “we need to end this war”, reported AFP. She said increasing spending on war is a “crime”.

Another pensioner called it a “shame and a disgrace” in a country that has no money to treat its own children.

Russia will run a nationwide test of its emergency public warning systems on Wednesday, letting sirens wail and interrupting television and radio broadcasts in a twice-yearly initiative amid the war in Ukraine.

At around 10.30am in most of Russia’s 11 time zones, sirens will sound for a minute, with loudspeakers broadcasting an “Attention everyone!” call, the emergency ministry said on the Telegram messaging app.

The exercise aims to check the warning systems, the readiness of those responsible for launching them and to raise public awareness, the ministry said, adding, “Don’t panic - everything is according to a plan.”

The frequency of rehearsals was doubled from last year, following the first event held in 2020.

It comes amid Russia’s war in Ukraine, which Moscow started in 2022, triggering the deepest crisis in its relations with the West since the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962.