Ukraine-Russia war: Putin launches record 188 drones in attack on Kyiv

A man charged with Donald Trump’s attempted assassination was apparently messaging British-trained Afghan commandos about recruitment to the Ukraine war just three days before he was arrested at a Florida golf course.

Ryan Wesley Routh was arrested on 15 September after allegedly aiming a powerful AK-47-style assault rifle through the bushes at Trump National Golf Club in West Palm Beach.

The 58-year-old former roofing contractor from North Carolina had become fanatical about supporting Ukraine’s right to defend itself from Russia’s invasion. He was said to have contacted the Ukraine’s International Legion with ideas that Ukrainian military personnel described as “delusional”.

In messages linked to Routh’s Whatsapp number and seen by The Independent and investigative newroom Lighthouse Reports, there are discussions with Afghan special forces about how to get to Ukraine to fight.

The extraordinary revelation highlights the desperation of these Afghan commandos who were paid for and trained by the British to fight the Taliban but were left abandoned after Kabul fell in 2021.

Holly Bancroft and May Bulman have the full report:

A Russian man was convicted and sentenced to 14 years in prison Monday after being found guilty of high treason for a video he sent to Ukraine’s security services, the latest in a series of espionage cases involving the conflict.

The Volgograd District Court said Nikita Zhuravel had been “in disagreement with the political course of the Russian Federation” and entered into correspondence with a representative from Ukraine’s security services online and carried out tasks for him. It did not give details on the tasks.

Zhuravel is already serving a 3 1/2-year sentence for burning a Quran in front of a mosque, which was handed down in February.

Ukraine’s military says it has shot down 76 out of total 188 Russian drones fired overnight. This is the highest number of attack drones Russia has fired at Ukraine in a single night.

The previous record came on 10 November, when Moscow launched a total of 145 drones overnight.

“During the night attack, the enemy launched a record number of ‘Shahed’ type attack UAVs and unmanned aerial vehicles of an unknown type,” the Ukrainian air force said on Telegram, adding they came from Orel, Bryansk, Kursk and Primorsko-Akhtarsk in Russia.

It said a total of 192 air targets, including four Iskander-M ballistic missiles, were fired at Ukraine overnight.

“Unfortunately, critical infrastructure objects have been hit, and private and multi-apartment buildings have been damaged in several regions due to a mass attack by UAVs,” the air force said.

Russia’s overnight air attacks have damaged the power grid in Ternopil, a major city in western Ukraine, cutting off electricity and water and disrupting heat supplies, officials said this morning.

Emergency services were working to restore water supply by early morning, Serhiy Nadal, head of the Ternopil region defence council headquarters, said on his Telegram channel, but power disruptions are set to continue for hours.

Electric buses that service the city will be replaced with regular buses and generators will help with power shortages in schools, hospitals and government institutions, he said.

The official did not provide details on the extent of the damage in the city that had a population of nearly of a quarter of a million before Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine. The full scale of the attack was also not immediately clear.

Ternopil, some 220km (134 miles) east of Nato-member Poland, and most of Ukraine were under overnight air raid alert for hours, according to Ukraine’s air force data.

Senior US officials have confirmed Ukraine has received clearance from the Biden administration to launch long-range ATACMS missiles on targets in Russia.

The US has changed the guidance and allowed Kyiv to use them “to strike particular types of targets” around Kursk, said John Kirby, national security council coordinator for strategic communications at the White House.

“Right now, they are able to use ATACMS to defend themselves, you know, in an immediate-need basis. And right now, you know, understandably, that’s taking place in and around Kursk, in the Kursk Oblast. I’d let the Ukrainians speak to their use of ATACMS and their targeting procedures, and what they’re using them for and how well they’re doing,” he said, responding to a question from a reporter on the effectiveness of use of ATACMS by Ukraine.

Volodymyr Zelensky has warned of a “severe escalation” of Moscow’s invasion, after Russia fired a new intermediate-range ballastic missile at Ukraine last week.

Initally, Ukraine suggested an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) had been launched against the city of Dnipro, would be the first known use in the war of a weapon designed to avoid defences travel thousands of miles, with the potential to carry nuclear warheads.

The new missile was experimental, but not an ICBM and Russia likely possessed only a handful of them, US officials said.

My colleague Barney Davis has more details here:

Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster Pat McFadden will speak at the Nato cyber defence conference at Lancaster House on Monday night.

Russia’s air defence systems destroyed 39 Ukrainian drones overnight over seven regions, Russia’s defence ministry said this morning.

Of these, 24 drones were destroyed over the Rostov region in the southern part of Russia, the ministry said on its Telegram channel.

Russian forces have been advancing in Ukraine at their fastest pace since the early months of the war and have been exploiting vulnerabilities among Kyiv’s troops, analysts said yesterday.

“Russian forces recently have been advancing at a significantly quicker rate than they did in the entirety of 2023,” analysts at the Washington-based Institute for the Study of War said.

The report noted recent confirmed Russian battlefield gains near Vuhledar and Velyka Novosilka, which are in the Donetsk region in eastern Ukraine, and said Putin’s forces were moving into the strategic town of Kurakhove.

The Russian army captured almost 235sq km (91 square miles) in Ukraine over the past week, a weekly record for 2024, according to a report published by the independent Russian news group Agentstvo.

Agentstvo analysed data from Deep State, a group with close links to the Ukrainian army that studies combat footage and provides frontline maps.

“Russian forces’ advances in southeastern Ukraine are largely the result of the discovery and tactical exploitation of vulnerabilities in Ukraine’s lines,” analysts at the ISW said in their report.

In the summer of 2015, three Syrian girls who had narrowly survived an airstrike some weeks earlier stood before Tulsi Gabbard with horrific burns all over their bodies. Gabbard, then a US congresswoman on a visit to the Syria-Turkey border as part of her duties for the foreign affairs committee, had a question for them.

“How do you know it was Bashar al-Assad or Russia that bombed you, and not Isis?’” she asked, according to Mouaz Moustafa, a Syrian activist who was translating her conversation with the girls.

It was a revealing insight into Gabbard’s conspiratorial views of the conflict, and it shocked Moustafa to silence. He knew, as even the young children did, that Isis did not have jets to launch airstrikes. It was such an absurd question that he chose not to translate it because he didn’t want to upset the girls, the eldest of whom was 12.

“From that point on, I’m sorry to say I was inaccurate in my translations of anything she said,” Moustafa told The Independent. “It was more like: How do I get these girls away from this devil?”

Even before Gabbard left the Democratic Party, ingratiated herself with Donald Trump and secured his nomination to become director of National Intelligence, she was known as a prolific peddler of Russian propaganda.

In almost every foreign conflict in which Russia had a hand, Gabbard backed Moscow and railed against the US. Her past promotion of Kremlin propaganda has provoked significant opposition on both sides of the aisle to her nomination.

My colleagues Richard Hall and Andrew Feinberg have more analysis here: