Ukraine war latest: Zelensky says Putin using country as missile testing ground

Two lionesses which were rescued from a conflict zone in Ukraine have arrived at their new home in Scotland.

Luna and Plusza, both aged four, arrived at the Five Sisters Zoo, West Calder, West Lothian, on Wednesday night.

The lionesses were rescued from an area affected by heavy shelling in eastern Ukraine in 2022, before being moved through Kyiv, Poland, and Belgium to reach the safety of Scotland.

Mr Kim spoke on Thursday at a defence exhibition where North Korea displayed some of its most powerful weapons systems, including intercontinental ballistic missiles designed to target the US mainland, the North’s Korean Central News Agency said. While meeting with army officers last week, he had pledged a “limitless” expansion of his military nuclear program.

Volodymyr Zelensky said Vladimir Putin is escalating the war, testing Ukraine’s partners and contradicting peace efforts by China, Brazil, the US and European allies. The Ukrainian leader said Mr Putin “must feel the cost of his deranged ambitions” and forced into real peace.

“Today, Putin admitted to taking a second step this year toward escalating and expanding this war. A new ballistic missile was used. Putin struck our city of Dnipro, one of Ukraine’s largest cities,” Mr Zelensky said, calling it “a clear and severe escalation in the scale and brutality of this war”

“Let me emphasise: this is already Russia’s second step toward escalation this year. The first was involving North Korea in the war against Ukraine with a contingent of at least 11,000 soldiers,” he said.

“Putin has taken both of these steps while ignoring everyone in the world who is calling for no further expansion of the war. He disregards calls from China, Brazil, European countries, the United States, and others. Putin alone started this war—an entirely unprovoked war—and he is doing everything to prolong it, now for over a thousand days,” he said in post on X.

Putin said he fired a new missile Oreshnik yesterday which struck a well-known missile factory in Dnipro. He also said Russia would issue advance warnings if it launches more strikes with the Oreshnik against Ukraine to allow civilians to evacuate to safety — something Moscow hasn’t done before previous aerial attacks.

A high-ranking North Korean General is reportedly injured in a recent Ukrainian strike in Russia’s Kursk region, Western officials said yesterday.

This is the first casualty of a senior North Korean military officer in the escalating Russia-Ukraine conflict, according to the Western officials, reported The Wall Street Journal. Ukraine launched at least 10 British-supplied Storm Shadow missiles into Kursk on Wednesday, according to Ukrainian and Western officials.

It is not immediately clear how the senior North Korean officer was wounded or his identity.

The US had declared that the North Korean troops fighting in Ukraine will become “fair game and fair targets for the Ukrainians” in October, John Kirby, a spokesperson for the National Security Council had said last month after the troubling intelligence confirmed Pyongyang was sending its troops to fight in the war.

The damage of two undersea internet cables in the Baltic sea must be seen as an act of sabotage, German defence minister Boris Pistorius has said.

A pair of fibre-optic communications cables were severed on Sunday and Monday, in an incident which “immediately raises suspicions of intentional damage”, Finland and Germany said in a joint statement.

A 745-mile (1,200 kilometre) cable linking Helsinki to the German port of Rostock stopped working at 2am on Monday, according to Finnish state-controlled cyber security and telecoms company Cinia.

Another cable linking Lithuania and Sweden’s Gotland Island went out of service at 8am on Monday, according to a Lithuanian communications firm.

My colleague Alex Croft has the full report:

Pentagon deputy press secretary Sabrina Singh confirmed that Russia’s missile was a new, experimental type of intermediate range missile based on it’s RS-26 Rubezh intercontinental ballistic missile. “This was new type of lethal capability that was deployed on the battlefield, so that was certainly of concern,” Ms Singh said, noting that the missile could carry either conventional or nuclear warheads. The UD was notified ahead of the launch through nuclear risk reduction channels, she said.

The Kremlin fired a new intermediate-range ballistic missile at Ukraine yesterday in response to Kyiv’s use this week of American and British missiles capable of striking deeper into Russia, president Vladimir Putin said.

For Ghulam, it began with a form handed to him by a colleague, offering him a way out. For more than 12 years, he had been part of an elite troop of Afghan special forces set up, trained and paid by the British government.

Now, after being forced to flee the Taliban and leave his homeland for Iran, he worked long days in a recycling factory and had to evade police because of his undocumented status.

The fellow Afghan who gave Ghulam the form knew of his military background and thought he might be open to an offer. For some in Ghulam’s situation, a form comes first; for others, it’s contact by phone from other Afghan veterans.

Slovakia’s Economy Ministry is analysing new U.S. sanctions against Gazprombank and will know their potential impact on Slovakia soon, the ministry said on Thursday.

Slovakia’s state-owned gas buyer SPP has a long-term contract with Gazprom and continues to buy Russian gas.

Analysts and observers say that the loosening of restrictions on Ukraine’s use of Western missiles is unlikely to change the the course of the war, but it puts the Russian army in a more vulnerable position and could complicate the logistics that are crucial in warfare.

“It is an important move and it pulls against, undermines the narrative that Putin had been trying to establish that it was fine for Russia to rain down Iranian drones and North Korean missiles on Ukraine but a reckless escalation for Ukraine to use Western-supplied weapons at legitimate targets in Russia,” said Peter Ricketts, a former UK national security adviser who now sits in the House of Lords.

Vladimir Putin has claimed Moscow launched a new hypersonic ballistic missile against Ukraine in response for long-range strikes by Kyiv inside Russia using UK and US long-range missiles.

The Russian leader said the “Oreshnik,” or Hazel, medium-range missile had been used in some of its latest strikes. Earlier, Ukraine’s air force said Russia had fired a intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) in an attack on the Ukrainian city of Dnipro – in what would be the first recorded use of the weapon during war

Ukrainian air defence forces said the missile – that has a range of more than 3,400 miles and can be used to carry nuclear warheads – was fired from Russia’s Astrakhan region, on the Caspian Sea. However, American officials said an initial US assessment indicated the strike was carried out with an intermediate-range ballistic missile which cannot travel so far, something backed by Putin’s remarks.

My colleague Alex Croft has the full report: