Russian forces captured the Ukrainian town of Ukrainsk in the eastern Donetsk region on Tuesday as they advanced westwards in a bid to take the whole of the Donbas, reported the Russian state-run RIA news agency and pro-Russian war bloggers.
The head of Russia’s nuclear testing site said on Tuesday his secretive facility was ready to resume nuclear tests “at any moment” if Moscow gave the order, in rare comments likely to fuel concerns that the risk of such a step is rising.
Top Russian security official Sergei Shoigu held talks with his Iranian counterpart in Tehran on Tuesday, Russian and Iranian media said, days after meeting North Korean leader Kim Jong-un in Pyongyang.
Russia reportedly captures town in east Ukraine
Russian forces captured the Ukrainian town of Ukrainsk in the eastern Donetsk region on Tuesday as they advanced westwards in a bid to take the whole of the Donbas, reported the Russian state-run RIA news agency and pro-Russian war bloggers.
Russian troops raised their flag on a mine ventilation shaft on the outskirts of the town, which had a population of more than 10,000 before the war, said RIA, citing an unidentified source in the Russian military.
“Ukrainsk is ours,” said Yuri Podolyaka, a Ukrainian-born, pro-Russian military blogger, adding that Russian forces had taken the city “almost intact”, allowing them to use it as a base for further offensive operations.
There was no immediate comment from the Russian or Ukrainian defence ministries. Reuters was unable to immediately verify battlefield claims from either side due to reporting restrictions in the war zone.
Russian forces had encircled Ukrainsk earlier this month as they advanced westwards towards Pokrovsk, part of what President Vladimir Putin says is a primary goal to take all of the Donbas region which has an area about half the size of the US state of Ohio.
Podolyaka said that Hirnyk, a town to the south with a pre-war population of more than 10,000, and Selydove, a town to the north with a pre-war population of more than 20,000, were the next targets.
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.
Russia in August advanced at its fastest monthly pace in two years, according to open source maps, though Ukraine also took a chunk of Russia’s Kursk region in a surprise incursion on 6 August.
Russian forces, which have taken about a fifth of Ukraine, control 98.5% of the Luhansk region and 60% of the Donetsk region, according to the same sources.
Together, the two regions make up the Donbas, which is the cradle of the war. After a pro-Russian president was toppled in Ukraine’s 2014 Maidan Revolution, Russia annexed Crimea and pro-Russian protests broke out in parts of the Donbas, where Moscow began supporting separatist forces.
Russia said on Tuesday it had repelled five new attempts by Ukrainian forces to smash through its border into the Kursk region, bringing the total number of reported attacks on the border to 26 in just the past six days.
The number of Ukrainians and Russians killed or wounded in the war has reached roughly one million, reported The Wall Street Journal.
Moscow ready to resume nuke testing 'at any moment'
The head of Russia’s nuclear testing site said on Tuesday his secretive facility was ready to resume nuclear tests “at any moment” if Moscow gave the order, in rare comments likely to fuel concerns that the risk of such a step is rising.
Moscow has not conducted a nuclear weapons test since 1990, the year before the fall of the Soviet Union, but some Western and Russian analysts say Putin could order one to try to send a message of deterrence to the West if it lets Ukraine use its long-range missiles to strike Russia, something that is under discussion.
A nuclear test by Russia could encourage others such as China or the US to follow suit, starting a new nuclear arms race between the big powers, which stopped nuclear testing in the years after the Soviet collapse.
Russia’s testing site, located on the remote Novaya Zemlya archipelago in the Arctic Ocean, was where the Soviet Union conducted more than 200 nuclear tests, including the detonation of the world’s most powerful nuclear bomb in 1961.
It is closely watched by Western spy satellites for activity amid signs of construction work last summer shown in open-source satellite images.
Rear Admiral Andrei Sinitsyn, the head of the facility, gave a rare interview to Rossiyskaya Gazeta, the Russian government’s official newspaper, which was published on Tuesday, days after Putin warned the West it would be directly fighting with Russia if it allowed Ukraine to strike Russian territory with Western-made long-range missiles and spoke of retaliation.
“The test site is ready for resumption of full-scale testing activities. It is ready in its entirety. Laboratory and testing facilities are ready. The personnel are ready. If the order comes, we can start testing at any moment,” said Sinitsyn.
Russia’s Shoigu visits Iran for security talks
Top Russian security official Sergei Shoigu held talks with his Iranian counterpart in Tehran on Tuesday, Russian and Iranian media said, days after meeting North Korean leader Kim Jong-un in Pyongyang.
Russia has deepened ties with Iran and North Korea, both of which are hostile to the US, since the start of its war in Ukraine.
The US views the growing relationships with concern and says both countries are supplying Russia with ballistic missiles for use in the conflict, something Moscow denies.
Shoigu’s trips are taking place at a crucial moment in the war, as Kyiv presses the US and its allies to let it use Western-supplied long-range weapons to strike targets such as airfields deep inside Russian territory.
The Nour news agency, affiliated with Iran’s Supreme National Security Council, said Shoigu met his Iranian opposite number, Ali Akbar Ahmadian. There was no immediate information on the outcome of the meeting.
Russia has repeatedly said it is close to signing a major agreement with Iran to seal a strategic partnership between the two countries.
Shoigu was Russian defence minister until May, when he was appointed secretary of the Security Council, which brings together Putin’s military and intelligence chiefs and other senior officials.
US probes uranium imports from China
President Joe Biden’s administration is probing a surge in imports of enriched uranium from China since late 2023 amid concerns the shipments are helping Moscow sidestep a US ban on imports of the power plant fuel from Russia, Reuters has learned.
US House legislators passed the ban on Russian-enriched uranium in December 2023 as part of a US effort to disrupt Putin’s ability to fund Russia’s war on Ukraine.
That month, shipments of enriched uranium from China to the US shot to 242,990kg, according to data from the US International Trade Commission. The imports are significant because from 2020 to 2022 China did not send any enriched uranium to the US
In May this year, the month that Biden signed the ban, China again sent the US a large amount of uranium — this time totalling 123,894kg.
The US Department of Energy “along with other relevant agencies is closely tracking imports from China to ensure the proper implementation of the recently enacted Prohibiting Russian Uranium Imports Act”, said a department spokesperson.
US officials were watching the imports from China and other countries to “ensure they are not importing Russian uranium as part of a scheme to export material produced domestically that they would otherwise have used in their own reactors”, said the spokesperson.
Russia is the world’s largest exporter of enriched uranium. Imports to the US from Russia through July this year stood at 313,050kg, down by 30% from last year. The ban allows some Russian imports to continue until 2028 if there are supply concerns.
Any circumvention of the ban could undermine the US effort to eventually eliminate dependence on Russian fuel for its nuclear power industry, the biggest in the world. It could also weaken the Biden administration’s attempts to jumpstart a domestic uranium supply chain, as the ban unlocked $2.72-billion in public funds to do so.
Meta bans Russian state media for ‘foreign interference’
Facebook owner Meta said on Monday it was banning RT, Rossiya Segodnya and other Russian state media networks from its platforms, claiming the outlets had used deceptive tactics to carry out covert influence operations online.
The ban, strongly criticised by the Kremlin, marks a sharp escalation in measures by the world’s biggest social media company against Russian state media, after years of more limited steps such as blocking the outlets from running ads and reducing the reach of their posts.
“After careful consideration, we expanded our ongoing enforcement against Russian state media outlets. Rossiya Segodnya, RT and other related entities are now banned from our apps globally for foreign interference activity,” said the social media company.
In addition to Facebook, Meta’s apps include Instagram, WhatsApp and Threads. Before the ban, RT had more than 7.2 million followers on Facebook and more than one million followers on Instagram.
Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov told reporters on Tuesday: “Meta is discrediting itself with these actions. Such selective actions against Russian media are unacceptable. This complicates prospects for normalising our relations with Meta.”
Moscow branded Meta an “extremist” organisation in 2022 and blocked Instagram and Facebook, objecting to changes in Meta’s hate speech policy designed to allow users to vent their anger over Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Moscow’s pre-existing bans on Instagram and Facebook may limit its ability to respond to Meta’s state media block, but WhatsApp, which Russia has stopped short of banning so far, is used by millions of Russians.
Telegram Messenger, whose Russian founder Pavel Durov was placed under formal investigation in France last month, is also widely used in Russia.
Ukraine makes new attempts to pierce Russia’s border
Russia said on Tuesday it had repelled five new attempts by Ukrainian forces to smash through its border into the Kursk region, bringing the total number of reported attacks on the border to 26 in just the past six days.
On 6 August, Ukraine launched the biggest foreign attack on Russia since World War 2, bursting through the border into the region of Kursk with thousands of troops supported by swarms of drones and heavy weaponry, including Western-made arms.
Russia, which sent tens of thousands of troops into Ukraine in 2022, began a major counteroffensive against the Ukrainian forces in Kursk on 10 September, pushing Kyiv’s forces back towards the Snagost River.
But Ukrainian forces have been trying for about a week to pierce the Russian border towards Veseloe and Medvezhe in an attempt to threaten the Russian counteroffensive about 15km to the west of the main theatre of battle in Kursk.
“With the support of army aviation and artillery fire, five attempts by the armed forces of Ukraine to pierce the border of the Russian Federation in the direction of Veseloe and Medvezhe were repelled,” said Russia’s defence ministry.
The ministry said that Russian forces were attacking in Lyubimovka, Malaya Loknya and a host of other settlements in Kursk.
Russian military bloggers said that Ukraine had carved out some territory towards Veseloe and Medvezhe and that Russian forces were taking back territory and storming Lyubimovka.
Russia strikes energy facilities in Ukraine’s Sumy region
Russia fired missiles at energy infrastructure in the northeast Ukrainian city of Sumy on Tuesday hours after an overnight drone strike on the region, reducing power in some areas and forcing authorities to use backup power systems.
The Sumy region’s governor, Volodymyr Artiukh, citing an initial assessment, said Russia had used at least four missiles in the latest attack on energy facilities. Ukraine’s energy ministry said Russia’s attacks had caused a fire at a power substation and cut power to more than 281,000 consumers. Power was later partially restored, it said.
Acting Sumy mayor Artem Kobzar said there were no casualties in the city, but regional officials said the overnight drone attack had damaged the region’s Konotop, Okhtyrka and Sumy districts.
The Ukrainian Air Force said Russia had launched 51 drones in Tuesday’s attack, of which 34 were shot down.
Russia also dropped three guided bombs on the town of Hlukhiv, Ukraine’s northern military command said on Telegram. Two people were wounded and 20 private houses, public transport and a grain silo suffered damage.
Moscow said its air defence systems had overnight destroyed 16 Ukrainian drones over Russia’s Kursk and Bryansk regions. DM