A Russian guided bomb struck a multistorey apartment building on Sunday in Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second-largest city, triggering a fire and injuring at least 41 people, the region’s governor said.
Ukrainian troops were suffering high losses because Western arms were arriving too slowly to equip the armed forces properly, President Volodymyr Zelensky told CNN in an interview aired on Sunday.
European governments should halt welfare benefits to Ukrainian men of military age who are living in their countries, said Poland’s foreign minister, a measure he said would help Ukraine call up more troops to fight Russian forces.
Russian bomb strikes Kharkiv apartment building, 41 injured
A Russian guided bomb struck a multistorey apartment building on Sunday in Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second-largest city, triggering a fire and injuring at least 41 people, the region’s governor said.
President Volodymyr Zelensky said the latest attack underscored the need for Ukraine’s Western partners to provide weapons and air defence systems and permission to use weaponry on targets deep inside Russia to save lives.
Oleh Syniehubov, the governor of Kharkiv region in northeastern Ukraine, said on Telegram that rescue operations were proceeding, with 12 people in hospital, three in serious condition. He said residents could be trapped under rubble.
Syniehubov posted photos of heavy damage to the top four of five storeys of the building, with smoke and fire billowing out of blown-out windows.
Zelensky, in his nightly video address, said three other guided bombs had struck villages in the Kharkiv region, where population centres have been a frequent target of Russian attacks near the Russian border.
Russia did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the apartment building but has denied intentionally targeting civilians despite having killed thousands of them since it invaded Ukraine in 2022.
Zelensky called for rapid decisions on long-range strikes “to destroy Russian military aviation right where it is based. These are obvious, logical decisions.
“Every Russian strike of this nature, every instance of Russian terror, like today in Kharkiv… this proves that there must be long-range capability and it must be sufficient.”
He said appropriate decisions were expected in the first instance from the US, France, Germany and Italy, “those whose decisiveness can help save lives.”
Ukraine ‘suffering high losses due to slow arms supplies’
Ukrainian troops were suffering high losses because Western arms were arriving too slowly to equip the armed forces properly, Zelensky told CNN in an interview aired on Sunday.
Russia has been gaining ground in parts of eastern Ukraine including around Pokrovsk. The capture of the transport hub could enable Moscow to open new lines of attack.
Zelensky said the situation in the east was “very tough”, adding that half of Ukraine’s brigades there were not equipped.
“So you lose a lot of people. You lose people because they are not in armed vehicles ... they don’t have artillery, they don’t have artillery rounds,” said Zelensky, speaking in English. CNN said the interview had been conducted on Friday.
Zelensky said weapons aid packages promised by the US and European nations were arriving very slowly.
“We need 14 brigades to be ready. Until now ... from these packages we didn’t equip even four,” he said.
White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan on Saturday said Washington was working on a “substantial” new aid package for Ukraine.
Zelensky is due to meet with US President Joe Biden this month and will present a plan for ending the war. The main elements are security and diplomatic support, as well as military and economic aid, he said.
The only thing Russian President Vladimir Putin fears is the reaction of his people if the cost of the war makes them suffer, said Zelensky. “Make Ukraine strong, and you will see that he will sit and negotiate.”
Polish minister calls for end to benefits for Ukrainian men in Europe
European governments should halt welfare benefits to Ukrainian men of military age who are living in their countries, said Poland’s foreign minister, a measure he said would help Ukraine call up more troops to fight Russian forces.
Following a meeting in Kyiv with his Ukrainian counterpart, Radoslaw Sikorski said ending social benefits for Ukrainian male refugees would also benefit state finances in host countries in Western Europe.
More than 4.1 million Ukrainians had temporary protection status in European Union countries as of July this year, and about 22% of them were adult men, according to data from the EU statistics office, Eurostat.
“Stop paying those social security payments for people who are eligible for the Ukrainian draft. There should be no financial incentives for avoiding the draft in Ukraine,” Sikorski said at a conference of international leaders in Kyiv.
“It’s not a human right to be paid to avoid the draft, to defend your country. We in Poland don’t do it.”
Ukrainian Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha welcomed Sikorski’s call.
“It’s time really to raise the question of the European Union developing programmes to return Ukrainians home. Certainly, appropriate conditions should be created for this. But this should be on the agenda. And I support the idea of Minister Sikorski,” said Sybiha.
Nearly 31 months into the war against Russia and with Moscow's forces slowly but steadily advancing in eastern Ukraine, Kyiv needs more soldiers to maintain its defence lines, rotate out exhausted troops and make up for losses.
Russia has a significant advantage in staff numbers and weapons on the battlefield.
Earlier this year, Ukraine adopted new legislation and implemented other measures, including lowering the call-up age for combat duty to 25 from 27 to increase the pace of mobilisation into the army.
Under the new law, Kyiv ordered Ukrainian men living abroad to renew their military draft information online and encouraged them to return to Ukraine and join the fight.
Ukraine imposed martial law at the start of Russia’s invasion in February 2022, banning men aged 18 to 60 from travelling abroad without special permission and beginning a rolling mobilisation of civilian men into the armed forces.
But many men of military age have still fled abroad to avoid the draft amid reports of corruption in the army recruitment system, allowing some men to bribe their way out of army service.
Russia, Ukraine exchange 206 prisoners in second swap in two days
Russia and Ukraine conducted a major exchange of 206 prisoners on Saturday, 103 apiece, in their second such swap in two days, following negotiations mediated by the United Arab Emirates, officials said.
Zelensky credited the release of the prisoners to his forces’ recent incursion into Russia. The released Ukrainians — 82 soldiers and privates and 21 officers — had been held since the early months of the war, he said.
The Russian Defence Ministry said that the 103 Russian soldiers exchanged had been taken prisoner in the border Kursk region where Ukrainian forces launched the surprise incursion in August.
“Our people are home,” said Zelensky on the Telegram messaging app. “We have successfully brought back another 103 warriors from Russian captivity to Ukraine.”
In his nightly video address, he thanked his combat forces for their courage and the team handling the exchanges. “In particular, our operation in the Kursk region gave a necessary boost,” he added.
Dmytro Lubinets, Ukraine’s human rights ombud, said that Kyiv had so far secured the return of 3,672 Ukrainians in 57 exchanges.
Ukraine defences down 10 drones and a missile
Ukraine’s air defence units destroyed 10 out of 14 drones that Russia launched overnight targeting its territory, Ukraine’s air force said on Sunday.
It also said on the Telegram messaging app that Russia launched two Iskander-M ballistic missiles and one Kh-59 guided air missile targeting the southern region of Odesa.
The guided air missile was destroyed, the air force said. It did not say what happened to the Iskander missiles or whether there was any damage as a result of the attack.
Zelensky said that during the past week, Russia used about 30 missiles of various types, more than 800 guided aerial bombs and almost 300 attack drones against Ukraine.
Putin could respond to missiles with nuclear test, say experts
Putin’s options to retaliate if the West lets Ukraine use its long-range missiles to strike Russia could include striking British military assets near Russia or, in extremis, conducting a nuclear test to show intent, three analysts said.
As East-West tensions over Ukraine enter a new and dangerous phase, British Prime Minister Keir Starmer and US President Joe Biden were holding talks in Washington on Friday on whether to allow Kyiv to use long-range US Atacms or British Storm Shadow missiles against targets in Russia.
Putin, in his clearest warning yet, said on Thursday that the West would be directly fighting Russia if it went ahead with such a move, which he said would alter the nature of the conflict.
He promised an “appropriate” response but did not say what it would entail. In June, however, he spoke of the option of arming the West’s enemies with Russian weapons to strike Western targets abroad, and of deploying conventional missiles within striking distance of the US and its European allies.
Ulrich Kuehn, an arms expert at the Institute for Peace Research and Security Policy in Hamburg, said he did not rule out Putin choosing to send some kind of nuclear message — for example, testing a nuclear weapon to cow the West.
“This would be a dramatic escalation of the conflict,” he said. “Because the point is, what kind of arrows has Mr Putin then left to shoot if the West then still continues, apart from actual nuclear use?”
Russia has not conducted a nuclear weapons test since 1990, the year before the fall of the Soviet Union, and a nuclear explosion would signal the start of a more dangerous era, Kuehn said, cautioning that Putin may feel he is seen as weak in his responses to increasing Nato support for Ukraine.
“Nuclear testing would be new. I would not exclude that, and it would be in line with Russia shattering a number of international security arrangements that it has signed up to over the decades during the last couple of years,” he said.
Gerhard Mangott, a security specialist at the University of Innsbruck in Austria, said he also thought it was possible, though in his view not likely, that Russia’s response could include some form of nuclear signal.
“The Russians could conduct a nuclear test. They have made all the preparations needed. They could explode a tactical nuclear weapon somewhere in the east of the country just to demonstrate that [they] mean it when they say, ‘We will eventually resort to nuclear weapons.’"
Russia’s UN ambassador, Vassily Nebenzia, told the UN Security Council on Friday that Nato would “be a direct party to hostilities against a nuclear power” if it allowed Ukraine to use longer-range weapons against Russia.
“You shouldn’t forget about this and think about the consequences,” he said.
In the case of Britain, Moscow was likely to declare that London had gone from a hybrid proxy war with Russia to direct armed aggression if it allowed Kyiv to fire Storm Shadow missiles at Russia, former Kremlin adviser Sergei Markov said on the social media platform Telegram on Friday.
Russia was likely to close the British embassy in Moscow and its own in London, strike British drones and warplanes close to Russia, for example over the Black Sea, and possibly fire missiles at F-16 warplanes that carry the Storm Shadows at their bases in Romania and Poland, Markov predicted.
Putin has tried and failed to draw red lines for the West before, prompting Zelensky to dismiss their importance.
But Putin's latest warning on long-range missiles is being seen inside and outside Russia as something he will have to act on if London or Washington allow their missiles to be used against Russia.
British PM urged to allow Ukraine to use long-range missiles
Starmer has been urged by former defence secretaries and an ex-premier to allow Ukraine to use long-range missiles inside Russian territory even without US backing, the Sunday Times reported on Saturday.
According to the Sunday Times, the call came from five former Conservative defence secretaries — Grant Shapps, Ben Wallace, Gavin Williamson, Penny Mordaunt and Liam Fox — as well as from ex-Prime Minister Boris Johnson.
They warned Starmer that “any further delay will embolden President Putin”, the Sunday Times said. DM