The outgoing head of Nato, Jens Stoltenberg, said on Monday he welcomed talks on Ukraine’s use of long-range missiles to strike inside Russian territory, but any decision on the issue would have to be made by individual allies.
President Vladimir Putin on Monday ordered the regular size of the Russian army to be increased by 180,000 troops to 1.5 million active soldiers in a move that would make it the second largest in the world after China’s.
Ukraine said on Monday it had asked the United Nations and the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) to join humanitarian efforts in Russia’s Kursk region following a cross-border incursion by Ukrainian forces.
Nato chief weighs in on Kyiv using long-range missiles on Russia
The outgoing head of Nato, Jens Stoltenberg, said on Monday he welcomed talks on Ukraine’s use of long-range missiles to strike inside Russian territory, but any decision on the issue would have to be made by individual allies.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has been pleading with allies for months to let Ukraine fire Western missiles including long-range US Atacms and British Storm Shadows deep into Russia to limit Moscow’s ability to launch attacks.
British Prime Minister Keir Starmer and US President Joe Biden held talks in Washington on Friday on whether to allow Kyiv to use the long-range missiles against targets in Russia. No decision was announced.
“I welcome these developments and these decisions but it’s for individual allies to make the final decisions,” Stoltenberg told LBC radio. “Allies have different policies on this.”
Some US officials are deeply sceptical that allowing the use of such missiles would make a significant difference in Kyiv’s battle against Russian invaders.
President Vladimir Putin has said the West would be directly fighting Russia if it allowed Ukraine to strike with Western-made long-range missiles.
Asked about possible Russian retaliation, Stoltenberg said there were “no risk-free options in the war. But I continue to believe that the biggest risk for us, for United Kingdom, for Nato, will be if President Putin wins in Ukraine.”
Putin orders increase in size of Russian army
Putin on Monday ordered the regular size of the Russian army to be increased by 180,000 troops to 1.5 million active soldiers in a move that would make it the second largest in the world after China’s.
In a decree published on the Kremlin’s website, Putin ordered the overall size of the armed forces to be increased to 2.38 million people, of which he said 1.5 million should be active soldiers.
According to data from the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS), a leading military think tank, such an increase would see Russia leapfrog the US and India in terms of the number of active combat soldiers it has at its disposal, second only to China in size. The IISS said Beijing had just over two million active duty service personnel.
The move, the third time Putin has expanded the army’s ranks since sending his military into Ukraine in February 2022, comes as Russian forces push forward in eastern Ukraine on parts of a vast 1,000km frontline and try to eject Ukrainian forces from Russia’s Kursk region.
Although Russia has a population more than three times larger than Ukraine’s and has been successfully recruiting volunteers on lucrative contracts to fight in Ukraine, it has — like Kyiv’s forces — been sustaining heavy battlefield losses, and there is no sign of the war ending soon.
Both sides say the exact size of their losses is a military secret.
Andrei Kartapolov, the chairperson of Russia’s lower house of parliament’s defence committee, said the increase in active troop numbers was part of a plan to overhaul the armed forces and gradually increase their size to match what he described as the current international situation and the behaviour of “our former foreign partners”.
Since 2022, Putin has previously ordered two official increases in the number of combat troops — by 137,000 and 170,000.
In addition, Russia mobilised more than 300,000 soldiers in September and October 2022 in an exercise which prompted tens of thousands of draft-age men to flee the country.
The Kremlin has said that no new mobilisation is planned for now, however, and that the idea is to continue to rely on volunteers signing up to fight in Ukraine.
Ukraine invites UN and ICRC to Russia’s Kursk region
Ukraine said on Monday it had asked the United Nations and the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) to join humanitarian efforts in Russia’s Kursk region following a cross-border incursion by Ukrainian forces.
Ukraine’s army remains in the Kursk region more than a month after launching the assault, in which Zelensky said Kyiv had taken control of about 100 settlements. Russia’s Defence Ministry said on Monday its forces had regained control of two more villages.
Ukrainian Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha said he had instructed his ministry to invite the UN and ICRC to work in the Kursk region on Sunday. The ministry confirmed that it had issued the requests.
“Ukraine is ready to facilitate their work and prove its adherence to international humanitarian law,” Sybiha said on X after visiting the Sumy region, from where Ukrainian forces launched the cross-border attack.
He said the Ukrainian army was ensuring humanitarian assistance and safe passage to civilians in the Kursk region.
Russia’s state-run Tass news agency quoted Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov as saying such statements were “provocative”. He made clear Moscow, which began its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, expected the UN and ICRC not to accept the invitations.
Germany wants to boost trade with Kazakhstan, says Scholz
Germany was interested in expanding trade with Kazakhstan while also ensuring such trade was not used to circumvent EU sanctions on Russia, Chancellor Olaf Scholz said on a visit to the Central Asian nation.
“I am grateful for the trusting dialogue between us, through which we want to prevent trade between us from being misused to circumvent sanctions,” said Scholz.
After Russian forces invaded Ukraine in February 2022, the West imposed sweeping sanctions on Russia, prompting Moscow to seek circuitous routes for importing technology and goods.
Sources have told Reuters that Russian businesses seeking goods banned by the West sometimes procured them from companies based in neighbouring Kazakhstan or other former Soviet nations. The Astana government has said it would abide by the sanctions.
Both Scholz and Kazakh President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev said their countries were interested in increasing trade in oil, rare earths, lithium and other raw materials.
“Both sides benefit from this exchange because it allows us to diversify our economies and make them more resilient,” said Scholz. “A very concrete example of this is the oil supplies from Kazakhstan, which helped us a lot after Russia failed as a supplier.”
The two met ahead of a broader meeting between Scholz and all five Central Asian leaders, an example of more active Western diplomacy in what has traditionally been Russia’s back yard.
Kazakhstan has already stepped in to replace Russia as the supplier of crude for Berlin’s Schwedt refinery. Scholz’s visit comes after Russian President Vladimir Putin threatened to curb sales of metals such as titanium to "unfriendly" nations.
Playing with fire has consequences, says Kremlin after Trump assassination attempt
The Kremlin said on Monday that the Ukrainian links of the alleged shooter in the assassination attempt on former US President Donald Trump showed that “playing with fire” had consequences.
The remark was a clear reference to the United States’ support of Ukraine against Russia. Washington has sent tens of billions of dollars of military aid to Kyiv in an attempt to help Ukrainian forces defeat Russia.
Asked about what the FBI called an apparent assassination attempt on Trump, Kremlin spokesperson Peskov said:
“It is not us who should be thinking, it is the US intelligence services who should be thinking. In any case, playing with fire has its consequences.”
CNN, Fox News and The New York Times identified the suspect as Ryan Wesley Routh (58) of Hawaii.
Three social media accounts bearing Routh’s name suggest he was an avid supporter of Ukraine in its war against Russia.
The New York Times reported it had interviewed Routh in 2023 for an article about Americans who were volunteering to help the Ukraine war effort.
Routh told the Times he’d travelled to Ukraine and spent several months there in 2022 and was trying to recruit Afghan soldiers who fled the Taliban to fight in Ukraine.
Russia says it retakes two villages in Kursk region
Russia said on Monday that its forces had retaken control of two villages in its western Kursk region from Ukraine, continuing what Moscow says is a significant counter-offensive there.
Russian forces have been battling Ukrainian troops in the Kursk region since 6 August, when Kyiv surprised Moscow with the biggest foreign attack on Russian soil since World War 2.
Reuters could not independently verify the report by Russia’s Defence Ministry that its troops had retaken the settlements of Uspenovka and Borki. They lie about 20km apart on the border with Ukraine’s Sumy region.
A senior Russian commander and pro-Kremlin war bloggers said last week that Russia had taken back control of about 10 settlements in the region — an assertion Reuters was unable to confirm.
Ukraine says its forces control about 100 villages in Kursk over an area of more than 1,300km2, which Russian sources dispute.
Meanwhile, Russian forces were pressing forward in eastern Ukraine towards Pokrovsk, a key rail and logistics hub for Kyiv’s forces. Seizing it would be a step towards Russia’s objective of capturing the whole of the Donetsk region.
Zelensky said on Friday that Ukraine’s Kursk incursion had slowed Russian forces in eastern Ukraine. But Putin said the Kursk assault had proved a distraction for Kyiv on the eastern frontline, weakening its defences there. DM