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WASHINGTON (AP) — Ukraine’s daring ground offensive has taken the fight to Russia, but not nearly as much as its leaders would like because, they say, the United States won’t let them. The U.S. restricts the use of long-range ballistic missiles it provides to Ukraine, which wants to aim them at military targets inside Russia. Ukraine’s offensive, along with a barrage of drones and missiles that Moscow launched this week, has intensified pressure on the Biden administration to ease its cautious approach to the use of Western weapons in escalating Ukrainian attacks. The Biden administration says its careful deliberations, including...

Many reports coming in this morning - but interesting to start with the Al Jazeera version of the story.

Ukrainian drones broadcast to Russian soldiers to put their guns down and surrender as Zelensky's troops storm Kursk.

MOSCOW, Aug 12 (Reuters) - Russia on Monday evacuated civilians from parts of a second region next to Ukraine after Kyiv increased military activity near the border just days after its biggest incursion into sovereign Russian territory since the start of the 2022 war. Ukrainian forces rammed through the Russian border last Tuesday and swept across some Western parts of Russia's Kursk region, a surprise attack that may be aimed at gaining leverage in possible ceasefire talks after the U.S. election. Apparently caught by surprise, Russia by Sunday had stabilised the front in the Kursk region, though Ukraine had carved...

Thousands of Ukrainian troops are taking part in an incursion aiming to destabilise Russia by showing up the country’s weaknesses, a top official from Ukraine has said as the assault entered its sixth day. “We are on the offensive. The aim is to stretch the positions of the enemy, to inflict maximum losses and to destabilise the situation in Russia as they are unable to protect their own border,” the security official said on condition of anonymity. Russia’s army had said about 1,000 Ukrainian troops were deployed in the cross-border incursion that began on Tuesday and appeared to catch the...

UKRAINE has dealt Vladimir Putin another huge blow after blasting a Russian gas rig in the Black Sea, killing 40 soldiers.

HUMILIATING video shows the moment despot Vladimir Putin looked slack-jawed as he's told by military chiefs that Russia has been invaded. The tyrant was ashen-faced in a crunch meeting with top generals where they told him 1,000 Ukrainian soldiers had made their way over the border. Putin lashed out on Wednesday, raging against Ukraine's "large-scale provocation" in the border region of Kursk. Russian military boss General Valery Gerasimov was forced to face the despot in a meeting and admit how a significant portion of territory in the region had been lost. The ageing despot, 71, looked quietly furious as he...

VLADIMIR Putin is rushing his troops and tanks to the Russian region of Kursk to defend against Ukraine's invasion.

Having gained a foothold in Russia’s southwestern Kursk region in the past few days, the Armed Forces of Ukraine (AFU) are now fast approaching the Kursk Nuclear Power Plant in the city of Kurchatov, the city’s mayor Igor Korpunkov warned on Friday. Reporting that fighting between Ukrainian and Russian troops was taking place “a few dozen kilometres” from the city of Kurchatov, Korpunkov sought to assure residents that all services and business in the city were operating “normally” and urged them not to panic. “The enemy is not only employing military weapons against us, but also so-called ‘psychological special forces’....

Russia continues to pay a high cost in troops and equipment during its full-scale invasion, according to Kyiv, the recent figures of which outline losses of several dozen artillery systems—as well as two warplanes. Sunday's update by Ukraine's military noted how two aircraft had been among the equipment losses Russia had suffered over the previous day. This followed what Ukraine's General Staff said was a drone strike on the Morozovsk airfield, a Russian military base in the Rostov region near the Ukrainian border, which is home to Sukhoi Su-27 and Su-34 glide bombers. Kyiv said that the strikes hit warehouses...

The recent advance of Russian forces on Ukraine's eastern front appears to be slowing as Kyiv's embattled units establish new defensive lines following the fall of Avdiivka last month. Ukrainian troops appear to have avoided a feared collapse of local defensive lines following their withdrawal from Avdviivka in February, after years of tough fighting over the fortified Donetsk settlement in the east of the country. Russian forces scored limited advances at other points along the Donetsk front, though this has not precipitated a breakthrough of Ukrainian lines there. The Institute for the Study of War's Sunday update of the battlefield...

UKRAINE is claiming to have sunk another Russian warship - with 50 sailors on board - using kamikaze sea drones. Footage shared today by Ukraine's ministry of defence showed the dramatic moment its boats sped toward Vladimir Putin's £55million Black Sea missile ship "Ivanovets" and sent it up in flames. The Ukrainian government's defence intelligence announced the hit on the 184ft warship via messaging service Telegram. It stated: "'Ivanovets' at the bottom - as a result of a special operation of the GUR of the Ministry of Defense, an enemy missile boat was destroyed." The department alleged soldiers of its...

The Wagner Group private military company (PMC) may be trying to force mobilized Russian personnel to sign contracts with the mercenaries fighting for Moscow to offset their troop losses in Ukraine. Spearheading Moscow's fierce fight for the Ukrainian city of Bakhmut that has raged for months, the group, headed by businessman Yevgeny Prigozhin, has seen a huge number of troops killed in action. "A group of around 170 mobilized men from these aircraft ... were forced to sign contracts with the Wagner PMC," Astra reported, citing the soldiers' relatives. Russian sources had previously reported that 100 mobilized personnel in Luhansk...

Putin promised the Russian people that Donbas would be liberated. And the path to that goal - however fantastical - lies through Bakhmut. So the show must go on. The battle is more symbolic than practical. Analysts agree the blood price that Russia has paid trying to take Bakhmut - thought to be more than 100 troops per day - is not worth the value of capturing it. 'They are just meat to Putin,' a commander named Kostyantyn told the FT on a visit to the front. 'And Bakhmut is a meat grinder. For what? A f****** metre of our...

The news clip showed a towering blaze in a residential neighborhood in Germany, followed by a weeping homeowner giving an interview from the rubble of her burned-down house. A chyron at the bottom of the screen explained that Ukrainian refugees had set the fire, accidentally ravaging the home of their German hosts. The video, which bore the logo of the German tabloid Bild, spread from a small YouTube account through the messaging app Telegram to Russian state media, until it could be found on nearly every major social platform, a forensic analysis later showed. But it was a fake, with...

Russia’s infamous Wagner Group has abandoned dozens of former Central African Republic (CAR) rebels in Ukraine’s Donbas region after recruiting them to fight Vladimir Putin’s war, two former CAR fighters told The Daily Beast. The CAR sources, who were recruited by Wagner after quitting the Union for Peace (UPC) rebel group last December, said that many of the 100 or so ex-UPC fighters currently in Ukraine have lost contact with Wagner after the group trained them and flew them to the Donbas region about eight months ago. “Some of our colleagues have called us [on the phone] to inform us...

Just how unstable have things become inside of the Kremlin, as domestic opposition to the war in Ukraine continues to grow? According to one memo reportedly leaked from inside the Russian government, concerns have been raised about members of the Federal Protective Service (FSO) in the event of a coup or other military conflict inside of Moscow. The FSO is charged with protecting the safety of both VIP visitors and some of the country’s top officials, including Vladimir Putin. Some of Russia’s upper-echelon officials are apparently worried that FSO agents may be “compromised” by hypnosis or other “psychologically infecting techniques.”...

Russia has been burning through equipment, ammunition and weaponry at rates that have raised questions about how effectively and for how long it can continue to prosecute its war against Ukraine. The challenge of sustaining the military effort isn’t unique to Russia, which after making significant territorial gains early in the war has been yielding territory back to Ukraine in phases. Both sides have suffered heavy losses of men and materiel since the invasion began in February, but Moscow is more dependent on its own shrinking economy to replenish supplies than Kyiv is. Ukraine’s economy has been more devastated than...