Russian troops on Wednesday took charge of the eastern Ukrainian town of Vuhledar, a bastion that had resisted intense attacks since Russia launched its full-scale assault in 2022.
Russia has dismissed the possibility of nuclear talks with the US, citing Washington’s stance on Nato expansion, said Russian Foreign Ministry spokesperson Maria Zakharova on Wednesday.
Ukraine could produce four million drones annually and was quickly ramping up its production of other weapons, President Volodymyr Zelensky said in comments authorised for publication on Wednesday.
Russia captures Vuhledar after two years of resistance
Russian troops on Wednesday took charge of the eastern Ukrainian town of Vuhledar, a bastion that had resisted intense attacks since Russia launched its full-scale assault in 2022.
The advance of Moscow’s forces, which control just under a fifth of Ukraine, has underlined Russia’s vast superiority in men and materiel as Ukraine pleads for more weapons from the Western allies that have been supporting it.
Ukraine’s eastern military command said it had ordered a pullback from the hilltop coal mining town to avoid encirclement by Russian troops and “preserve personnel and military equipment”.
The Russian defence ministry did not mention Vuhledar in its daily battlefield report.
Russian Telegram channels, however, 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 the last Ukrainian forces from the 72nd Mechanised Brigade, a unit famous for its resistance, had abandoned the town late on Tuesday.
President Vladimir Putin has said Russia’s primary tactical goal is to take the whole of the Donbas region — the provinces of Donetsk and Luhansk — in southeastern Ukraine.
Russia controls about 80% of the Donbas, a heavy industry hub where the conflict began in 2014 when Moscow supported pro-Russian separatist forces after a pro-Russian president was toppled in Kyiv and Moscow seized Crimea from Ukraine.
Since Russia sent its army into Ukraine in February 2022, the war has largely been a story of grinding artillery and drone strikes along a heavily fortified 1,000km front involving hundreds of thousands of soldiers.
But in August the battlefield became much more dynamic: Ukraine smashed through the border in Russia’s Kursk region in a bid to divert Russian forces, and Russian troops began advancing faster than before in eastern Ukraine.
Russian forces have been pushing westwards at key points along some 150km of the front in the Donetsk region, with the logistics hub of Pokrovsk also a key target.
They captured Ukrainsk on 17 September and then began encircling Vuhledar, about 80km south of Pokrovsk.
Russia has been using pincer tactics to trap and then constrict Ukrainian strongholds. Images from the area showed intense bombardment of the town with artillery and aerial glide bombs.
Neither side discloses losses, and each said the other had paid a high human price for the town.
Control of Vuhledar, which lies at the intersection of the eastern and southern battlefields, is significant because it will ease Russia’s advance as it tries to pierce deeper behind the Ukrainian defensive lines.
Russian bloggers said Russia could now try to push towards Velyka Novosilka, just over 30km to the west.
Vuhledar also sits close to a railway line connecting Crimea to the Donbas region.
Russian forces currently control 98.5% of the Luhansk region and 60% of the Donetsk region.
Russia rules out nuclear talks with US
Russia has dismissed the possibility of nuclear talks with the US, citing Washington’s stance on Nato expansion, said Russian Foreign Ministry spokesperson Maria Zakharova on Wednesday.
“We see no point in dialogue with Washington without respect for Russia’s fundamental interests. First of all, this is the problem of Nato’s expansion into the post-soviet space, which poses threats to common security,” said Zakharova.
On Tuesday, Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said Russia would not discuss signing a new treaty with the US to replace an agreement limiting each side’s strategic nuclear weapons that expires in 2026 as it needs to be broadened and expanded to cover other states.
Ukraine ramps up arms production
Ukraine could produce four million drones annually and was quickly ramping up its production of other weapons, President Volodymyr Zelensky said in comments authorised for publication on Wednesday.
Speaking on Tuesday to executives from dozens of foreign arms manufacturers in Kyiv, Zelensky 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 Zelensky.
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.
More than 31 months into its war with invading Russian forces, and with no end in sight, Ukraine now spends roughly half of its state budget — or about $40-billion — on defence.
Ukraine also receives large amounts of military as well as financial support from its Western allies.
Russia, which is much larger and richer than its southern neighbour, is expected to hike its own military spending by 25% next year from its 2024 level to about $145-billion.
Ukrainian officials say they expect foreign funding to steadily diminish while its defence needs continue to balloon. Kyiv is increasingly focused on producing as much as possible domestically.
Russia tries four journalists for links to Navalny team
Four Russian journalists went on trial in Moscow on Wednesday on charges of involvement in an “extremist” group after authorities accused them of working for the banned organisation of the late dissident Alexei Navalny.
The cases against Antonina Favorskaya, Sergei Karelin, Konstantin Gabov and Artem Kriger highlight the increasingly precarious position of journalists inside Russia, where press freedom groups say dozens are currently behind bars.
After about 30 minutes of open proceedings in court, the judge granted a prosecution request to evict press and spectators for the remainder of the trial on the basis of a letter from the counter-extremism department of the interior ministry that Navalny supporters were preparing “provocations”.
Independent news outlet Mediazona quoted Kriger as telling the judge before journalists were ordered from the room: “This is just some kind of archaism. This is how they do it in totalitarian regimes.”
The journalists each face up to six years in prison if convicted. They were not invited to plead innocent or guilty in the portion of the hearing that was open to the press.
Prosecutors say they created materials for the YouTube channel of Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation (FBK), which is banned in Russia as “a foreign agent” and an extremist organisation.
Gabov and Karelin are freelancers who have worked for a variety of news organisations including, respectively, Reuters and The Associated Press. A Reuters spokesperson said Gabov had worked occasionally for the news agency between late 2022 and early 2024 as a desk producer.
Favorskaya and Kriger both work for SOTAVision, an independent outlet that has also been designated a foreign agent. Favorskaya recorded the last video of Navalny taking part in a court hearing on 15 February, the day before he died suddenly in an Arctic penal colony. She was arrested in March, and Kriger in June.
Russia has intensified pressure on domestic and foreign reporters since the start of its war in Ukraine. According to the international press freedom group Reporters without Borders, 34 journalists and six other media workers are currently in detention in Russia.
Ultra-Orthodox Israelis celebrate New Year in Ukraine
Huge crowds of Israeli ultra-Orthodox Jews celebrated the Jewish New Year in the Ukrainian city of Uman on Wednesday, as unfazed by news of Iranian missiles raining on Israel as they were by the risk of Russian attacks on Ukraine during their visit.
Tens of thousands of followers of Rabbi Nachman of Breslov, who lived in the late 18th and early 19th century, gather in Uman every year to honour the rabbi, who chose the Ukrainian city as his resting place and was buried there in 1810.
This year’s Rosh Hashanah coincided with a sweeping ballistic missile attack on Israel by Iran, a potentially dangerous new phase in the war triggered by the Hamas-led assault on Israel last October.
But the news from home did not dampen the euphoric mood in Uman, about 200km south of Kyiv, where the streets were filled with the sound of chants and rhythmic clapping.
“Everyone is good because we have God. That’s it, there’s nothing to worry about,” said one of the visitors, who gave only his first name, Israel.
More than 30,000 ultra-Orthodox Jews arrived in Uman for Rosh Hashanah, according to the United Jewish Community of Ukraine. Another 14,000 were unable to reach the city, some of them because Iran’s attack thwarted their travel plans.
Asked whether they had any concerns about the threat from Russia, which has been hitting Ukraine with missiles, drones and bombs as part of its full-scale invasion launched in 2022, pilgrim after pilgrim said they had none.
“Ukraine is safer than Israel. If you want a safe place, you come to Ukraine,” said Akiva, who did not wish to give his surname, joking that the distance from Uman to the Russian border was greater than the entire length of Israel.
Forced closure of weekly spells end for Russia’s independent print media
In years past, the staff of the Moscow weekly Sobesednik would throw a party each February to toast the newspaper’s anniversary.
On its 40th birthday this year, journalists instead gathered nervously in a room at the editorial offices in the Russian capital.
In another sat a colonel from a shadowy branch of Russia’s interior ministry — the Centre for Combating Extremism — calling reporters in one-by-one for questioning, recalled editor-in-chief Oleg Roldugin.
The day before, Sobesednik, whose name means “interlocutor” or “conversation partner”, had run a two-page spread on the death of opposition leader Alexei Navalny, including a lengthy obituary and coverage of spontaneous vigils held in his honour across the Russian capital.
A photograph of a smiling Navalny was splashed across the front page with the caption: “... but there is hope!”
Navalny, easily Russia’s most significant opposition figure, had died in unclear circumstances in his Arctic prison colony, jailed on a raft of charges that he said were trumped up. In Russia, even to print Navalny’s name means risking criminal prosecution.
But no major repercussions came. The Navalny print run was quickly confiscated, but subsequent editions rolled off the presses and hit newsstands each week.
In mid-September, the news Roldugin had long dreaded finally arrived. Authorities labelled the paper’s publisher a “foreign agent”, a Soviet-era label shared by 865 other individuals and organisations that subjects them to onerous financial reporting requirements.
Roldugin feared his advertisers would scatter. Each article would have to be prefaced with a statement declaring its publisher a foreign agent.
A few days after the “foreign agent” designation, Sobesednik announced it was suspending publication.
“It would be impossible to read,” said Roldugin, who has led the paper since 2021. “The paper would have to be sold sealed and labelled ‘18+’, like pornography. Because we did journalism instead of propaganda.
“It’s impossible to carry on.”
The demise of Sobesednik, Russia’s last independent print newspaper, is a familiar tale.
Since President Vladimir Putin took office nearly 25 years ago, most independent media outlets have been shuttered or forced into exile. State media strictly toe the government line.
For his part, Roldugin hopes the newspaper can one day return.
In the final edition, under the crossword, the paper’s usual concluding phrase remains: “Thank you for reading us, see you in a week!” DM