“Ukraine – Russia”

Britain and the United States are on the verge of allowing Ukraine to use long-range missiles against targets in Russia after accusing President Putin of “escalating” the conflict by accepting ballistic missiles from Iran.

David Lammy, the foreign secretary, and Anthony Blinken, the US secretary of state, said they would return to their respective countries to inform their leaders of the “operational details” surrounding Ukraine’s use of weapons such as Storm Shadow missiles after meeting President Zelensky in Kyiv.

A Russian missile attack in central Ukraine has killed 51 people and injured more than 200, Ukrainian officials have said.

President Zelensky said that Russian forces struck “an educational institution and a neighbouring hospital” with two ballistic missiles in the city of Poltava. The educational facility in question is understood to be the Poltava Military Institute of Communications.

Video from the scene showed destroyed buildings and the wounded being treated on the street. The death toll is expected to rise.

Things are starting to heat up on the Ukrainian front line once more. After a long period of attrition warfare and static front lines, we are starting to see movement that could bring the war to its next phase. The Russians are now advancing on Pokrovsk, a key transport and logistics hub in Donetsk. Some analysts think that if Pokrovsk falls, the entire Ukrainian front line in the Donbas will start to collapse.

On Friday evening, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky announced his decision to replace the commander of the country’s air forces, Lt Gen Mykola Oleshchuk. Lt Gen Anatolii Kryvonozhko has been appointed interim commander and, while Zelensky did not provide any explanation for the change, he stressed his responsibility to “take care of all our warriors”.

The case of a soldier whose leg was amputated by the NHS because antibiotics could not treat his infection is a sign of a growing crisis, doctors say

When the soldier arrived from the battlefields of Ukraine, the NHS team was — at first — most concerned about his extensive shrapnel wounds.

But when they had cleaned up the 35-year-old’s injuries, the doctors at St George’s Hospital in south London realised they had a bigger problem on their hands. Deep within the blast wounds on his left leg, a bacterial infection had taken hold.

An initial cocktail of five different antibiotics failed to kill the bacteria. With the wound still festering, they switched regimens to try four other drugs, including colistin, a “top shelf” antibiotic with severe side effects, reserved for cases where nothing else will work. But those, too, had a limited impact.

Ukrainian forces have launched a new attack on Russia’s border, attempting to break through the Belgorod region southeast of the Kursk region they entered and occupied three weeks ago.

Russian Telegram channels with links to the security services said Ukrainians attacked the Nekhoteyevka border checkpoint, prompting Russian artillery to fire back. The Mash Telegram channel said that about 200 Ukrainian troops and infantry fighting vehicles had attacked the checkpoint at Nekhoteyevka.

After the Kremlin-backed Wagner mercenary group suffered its recent and heaviest African defeat when dozens of Russians were killed in an ambush in July, Ukraine’s military intelligence service was quick to claim some credit.

That boast now looks closer to a symbolic defeat for Kyiv after the juntas of Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger wrote to the United Nations Security Council demanding it denounce Ukraine’s alleged support of rebel groups in the Sahel region of west Africa where Wagner is deployed.

Ukraine’s special forces have released footage which they claim shows a pontoon bridges being destroyed with US-made missiles in Kursk.

The footage displays a range of attacks in Russia’s border region, including Himars hitting the bridges, which Kyiv said were destroyed along with crucial Russian equipment.

It also shows Ukrainian Defense Forces destroying Russian field ammunition, fuel depots, a radio-electronic warfare complex, and a 152-mm D-20 gun, a Ukrainian military officer told the Kyiv Post.

Few were privy to the battle plans being hatched in the heart of the Ukrainian government for the largest foreign invasion on Russian soil since the Second World War.

At 3am on Tuesday, August 6, Ukrainian soldiers crossed the border into Russia in a highly co-ordinated assault that regained the battlefield initiative from Moscow.

The invasion of the Kursk region by several thousand of Kyiv’s troops may have changed the narrative of a slow, grinding attritional war in the east of the country — although it remains uncertain how much it could ultimately change the course of the conflict.

The attack on the Nord Stream pipelines was shocking, the damage enormous, and the geopolitical consequences are still keenly felt almost two years after the attack. The 1,200-kilometer (746-mile) Nord Stream 1 served as the key delivery system between Russian energy giants and their buyers in Germany, with Berlin braving the ire of its allies to construct another undersea delivery system, Nord Stream 2, which would run mostly parallel to the first one and carry another 55 billion cubic meters (1.942 trillion cubic feet) of gas per year.

It was not to be. A series of underwater blasts on September 26, 2022, crippled the pipelines, which were already out of action due to tensions between Berlin and Moscow provoked by Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Nearly two years later, no suspects have been arrested, and it is not fully clear who was behind the sabotage.