Ukraine-Russia conflict newest: Zelensky claims his troops ‘gradually pushing back’ Putin’s forces in Sumy

Russian forces have pummeled Ukraine with drones and other weapons, killing three people and injuring scores of others despite international pressure to accept a ceasefire, officials said yesterday.

According to the Ukrainian air force, Russia launched a barrage of 63 drones and decoys at Ukraine overnight. It said that air defences destroyed 28 drones while another 21 were jammed.

Ukraine’s police said two people were killed and six were injured over the past 24 hours in the eastern Donetsk region, the focus of the Russian offensive. One person was killed and 14 others were also injured in the southern Kherson region, which is partly occupied by Russian forces, police said.

Russian president Vladimir Putin said that drones had played a major role in the conflict in Ukraine and called for the rapid development and deployment of separate drone forces within the military.

“We are currently creating unmanned systems troops as a separate branch of the military and we need to ensure their rapid and high-quality deployment and development,” Russian news agencies quoted him as saying at a meeting on arms development.

Mr Putin told the second day of the gathering that Russia was well aware how Ukraine was dealing with the issue.

“But on the whole, I do not believe we are lagging behind on anything,” he was quoted as saying. “More to the point, it seems to me we are bringing together good experience with a view to creating just such forces.”

The Russian president also stressed developing air defences, which he said had destroyed more than 80,000 targets during the conflict that Russia still calls a special military operation.

“In this respect, a new state armaments programme must ensure the construction of a versatile air defence system capable of operating in any circumstances and efficiently striking air attack weapons, regardless of their type,” he said.

Drones have played a leading role for both sides in the more than three-year-old conflict pitting Moscow against Kyiv. Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky has since the outbreak of the war in February 2022 stressed the importance of developing a domestic drone development and production industry.

Germany is not considering delivering Taurus cruise missiles to Ukraine despite Kyiv’s repeated requests, the country’s defence minister Boris Pistorius said.

Although Germany is one of Ukraine’s main military backers, Berlin has never supplied Taurus missiles, which have a range in excess of 300 miles (480 km).

Answering a journalist’s question during his fifth visit to Kyiv since the start of the war, Mr Pistorius said, “Since you asked me whether we are considering this, my answer is no.”

In the same news conference, the minister said his country’s military support for Ukraine had reached €7bn ($8.12bn) this year and a further €1.9bn were pending parliamentary approval.

Spending on nuclear weapons by the world’s nine nuclear-armed nations rose by 11 per cent in 2024, a report by the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons said today.

The $10bn annual increase to $100.2bn went towards modernising and in some cases expanding nuclear arsenals, according to ICAN, a global civil society coalition that seeks the total elimination of atomic weapons.

“Nuclear-armed countries could have paid the United Nations’ budget 28 times with what they spent to build and maintain nuclear weapons in 2024,” the report said.

“In terms of kind of the increase in spending in the UK and France, I think we certainly have seen, at least in the rhetoric of political leaders, a reference to the ongoing war in Ukraine, to the tensions, and that could be playing a role,” Alicia Sanders-Zakre, a policy and research coordinator at ICAN, told reporters at a briefing in Geneva.

The US recorded the largest annual increase in nuclear spending in 2024, rising by $5.3bn, the report said. Its total expenditure of $56.8bn exceeded the combined spending of all other nuclear-armed states, it said.

China spent $12.5bn, followed by Britain at $10.4bn, which was an increase of $2.2bn, ICAN said.

It said the other nuclear-armed states were France, India, Israel, North Korea, Pakistan and Russia.

In the first five months of his second term, the US president has aggressively pushed for peace but refused to offer unconditional support to Kyiv in its defence against Russian aggression.

Speaking on Sky News, Mr Brennan said the US president’s approach to forcing through a quick peace deal in Ukraine was “naive” and “unsophisticated”.

“I think that Donald Trump doesn’t know what he will do,” said Brennan when asked what the president will do next to secure peace in Ukraine.

My colleague Alex Croft reports:

Volodymyr Zelensky has announced Kyiv is seeking to boost investment for Ukraine’s air defence infrastructure.

“We have some weapons still in development, some systems have already been developed, and we are trying to secure more funding for mass production,” Mr Zelensky said.

“These include various types of intercepter drones, among other things.”

He said he will “not disclose which systems are located where, or which energy facilities they protect”.

German defence minister Boris Pistorius arrived in Kyiv to discuss further weapons aid for Ukraine.

“The purpose of the trip is mainly to demonstrate… that Germany, that the new federal government, continues to stand by Ukraine in the current situation, which has not become any easier,” Mr Pistorius told journalists upon his arrival in Kyiv yesterday.

Germany is Ukraine’s second-biggest military backer after the United States, and German chancellor Friedrich Merz recently gave Ukraine the green light for “long range fire” with weapons supplied by Germany and others, angering Moscow.

Russia and Ukraine met for peace talks in Istanbul earlier this month in a renewed push to settle the conflict, which began with Russia’s invasion in February 2022, but efforts to end the three-year conflict with Russia faced headwinds.

The two sides disagree over issues including territorial concessions and the prospect of Ukraine’s future Nato membership, however, and fighting has raged on, with a Russian drone attack killing several people this week.

The US secretary of state has reaffirmed America’s desire to foster closer ties with Russia as well as “constructive engagement” to bring about an end to the war in Ukraine.

Marco Rubio congratulated Russians on the Russia Day holiday, to mark the day the country declared its sovereignty in 1990.

“The United States remains committed to supporting the Russian people as they continue to build on their aspirations for a brighter future,” he said in a statement published on the Department of State website.

“We also take this opportunity to reaffirm the United States’ desire for constructive engagement with the Russian Federation to bring about a durable peace between Russia and Ukraine.”

He continued: “It is our hope that peace will foster more mutually beneficial relations between our countries.”

The number of displaced people arriving in Ukraine’s war-hit Sumy region is increasing, said Kateryna Arisoi, head of Pluriton, a non-governmental organisation that operates a shelter for internally displaced people.

“We are seeing the frontline slowly moving toward Sumy,” she said. “So far evacuation has been ordered in more than 200 settlements.”

Last week, a Russian rocket attack on Sumy killed three people and injured 28, including three children, while also damaging several buildings.

Both Russia and Ukraine deny targeting civilians in their attacks, but thousands of civilians have died in the three-year-long conflict, the vast majority of them Ukrainian.

Russia, which controls just under one-fifth of Ukrainian territory, has seized over 190 sq kms (73 square miles) of the Sumy region in less than a month, according to pro-Ukrainian open-source maps.

Russian troops have captured more ground in the past days, advancing to around 20 kilometres from Sumy’s northern suburbs, bringing the city closer to being within the range of long-range artillery and drones.

Ukraine’s military has claimed that Russian troop losses have reached one million.

Of those million soldiers either killed or wounded, the General Staff of the Armed Forces of Ukraine said well over half of those casualties – more than 628,000 -occurred in the last year and a half.

“This is the price the enemy pays for unleashing a bloody war in Ukraine,” the armed forces said.