Ukraine Russia war: North Korea’s 10,000 troops to join Putin’s invasion, says US

Falling debris from a destroyed Russian drone injured two people and set a residential building on fire in Kyiv, the mayor of the Ukrainian capital said today.

One of the people injured by debris in Kyiv’s Solomianskyi district was taken to hospital, mayor Vitali Klitschko said on his Telegram channel. He said several cars were also on fire.

A Reuters’ witness saw smoke rising over the district’s residential area, which is located in Kyiv’s west. Photos posted by Kyiv’s military administration on its Telegram channel showed a residential building and nearby cars burning in the dark.

The administration said Ukraine’s air defence units were trying to repel a Russian drone attack on the city and that drone debris fell also onto the Sviatoshynskyi district in Kyiv’s west, but there was no immediate reports of damage.

At least four people died in Russia’s overnight bombing of Ukraine’s second-largest city of Kharkiv, the mayor of Kharkiv said.

The four were killed after midnight in Russia’s bombardment of Kharkiv’s Osnovianskyi district, mayor Ihor Terekhov said.

North Korea has sent about 10,000 troops to Russia to train and likely fight against Ukraine within “the next several weeks,” the Pentagon said last night, in a move that Western leaders say will intensify the almost three-year war and jolt relations in the Indo-Pacific region.

Some of the North Korean soldiers have already moved closer to Ukraine, Pentagon spokeswoman Sabrina Singh said, and were believed to be heading for the Kursk border region, where Russia has been struggling to push back a Ukrainian incursion.

Earlier yesterday, Nato secretary-general Mark Rutte confirmed recent Ukrainian intelligence reports that some North Korean military units were already in the Kursk region.

North Korean deployment represents “a significant escalation” in Pyongyang’s involvement in the conflict and “a dangerous expansion of Russia’s war,” he has said.

Ukraine’s military intelligence forces and resistance fighters sabotaged a railway bridge in the Russian-occupied city of Berdyansk, a military intelligence source has claimed. to the Kyiv Independent on Oct. 28.

The bridge between the Vodokanal utility company building and a car wash at Skhidnyi Avenue was blown up after several explosions overnight, the source told the Kyiv Independent.

Berdyansk – a port city in the Zaporizhzhia region – has been occupied by Russia from the early days of Russia’s full-scale invasion.

A Trump presidency would “be rocky” for Germany, France and other Nato members not spending 2 per cent of their GDP on defence, a former Trump administration official has suggested.

“I think it’s going to be rocky for them, and for Nato members not paying the 2 per cent. It’s a big deal for Trump,” Fred Fleitz, a former CIA analyst, now at the America First Policy Institute Centre for American Security, told the Financial Times.

If elected US president, Donald Trump could seek to reimagine the Minsk agreements, which aimed to end the fighting in eastern Ukraine in 2014 and 2015 between Ukrainian forces and Russian-backed separatists, a longtime adviser has told the Financial Times.

But this time there would be enforcement mechanisms with consequences for breaching the deal, policed by European troops – as opposed to Nato or UN peacekeeping forces, the aide said, adding: “There are two things America will insist on. We will not have any men or women in the enforcement mechanism. We’re not paying for it. Europe is paying for it.”

Russian forces are making swift and “significant tactical advances” into the eastern Ukrainian city of Selydove, war monitors have said.

Open source data suggests Russian forces advanced in September at their fastest rate since March 2022, despite Ukraine taking a part of Russia’s Kursk region.

Those rapid advances have continued in the past week as Russian forces appear to be charging towards – or even into – the city of Selydove, which is less than 10 miles south of its main target, the larger city of Pokrovsk, a linchpin of the wider Donetsk region’s defences.

Our foreign affairs reporter Tom Watling reports:

At football games in Ukraine, crowd sizes are determined by the capacity of the nearest bomb shelter.

For the first time since the full-scale war began in 2022, the Ukrainian Premier League is holding a full season with fans present, as martial-law bans on public gatherings have been eased.

Despite the constant threat of airstrikes, Dynamo Kyiv supporters eagerly snap up the 1,700 tickets available for each home game at the 16,000-seat Valeriy Lobanovskyi Stadium. Many fans are keen to experience a rare moment of calm, free from the country’s traditionally intense sporting rivalries.