Ukraine-Russia struggle newest: Putin hails ‘unstoppable’ hypersonic missiles as Moscow ramps up threats to West

Russia has signed a new law on debt forgiveness for new recruits signing up to fight in the war in Ukraine.

The law reportedly forgives up to 10 million roubles ($95,835) of debt arrears for people signing up with the country’s defence ministry to fight in Ukraine for at least a year, Reuters reported citing a Russian government website.

This latest move comes as Russia continuously attempts to recruit more soldiers into its military to fight in Ukraine by offering large payouts, sometimes many times the country’s average salary.

Russia has damaged 321 port facilities and 20 foreign merchant vessels since July 2023, according to Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky.

Ships travelling along the Black Sea route have been at risk of being attacked by Russian forces.

Mines drifting along this trade route have also posed a heightened risk to maritime transport.

Mr Zelensky said Ukraine’s food exports, of which many rely on this route, “provide food for 400 million people in 100 countries around the world.”

“Food prices in Egypt, Libya, Nigeria, and other countries in Africa directly depend on whether farmers and agricultural companies in Ukraine can operate normally,” the Ukrainian president said at a conference on food security in Kyiv on Saturday.

Russia could launch a wave of cyber attacks on Britain and “turn the lights off for millions of people”, a UK minister is reportedly slated to warn Nato at a conference next week.

“With a cyber attack, Russia can turn the lights off for millions of people. It can shut down the power grids,” Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster Pat McFadden said ahead of the Nato cyber defence conference, according to The Sunday Telegraph.

“We know exactly what they are doing, and we are countering their attacks both publicly and behind the scenes,” the Labour MP said, urging allies to “not underestimate” the threat posed by Moscow in its “hidden war”.

Nato general secretary Mark Rutte has travelled to Donald Trump’s 126-room gold-encrusted Mar-a-Lago estate to meet with the president-elect.

Mr Rutte met with Trump on Friday 22 November to discuss a “range of global security issues facing the Alliance”, Nato said.

He also met with US Congressman Mike Waltz and other members of the President-elect’s national security team.

During Trump’s first term, he repeatedly said he wanted out of the alliance and complained about the US paying for most of the organisation’s defence.

Trump argued he was sick of European “free-loaders” who were profiting from US protection, despite not living up to the Nato goal of spending 2 per cent of their GDP on defences.

Russia’s Defence Ministry said on Friday that its forces had captured the settlement of Novodmytrivka in eastern Ukraine’s Donetsk region, their latest gain in what Defence Minister Andrei Belousov described as an accelerated advance.

Ukraine’s military made no mention of the village, north of the key town of Kurakhove. But in a late night report, the General Staff noted it was among eight villages where Russian forces were engaged in fighting and trying to advance.

While launching an intermediate-range missile is a less threatening signal, the incident could still set off alarms and Moscow notified Washington briefly ahead of the launch, according to US officials.

The Kremlin said Russia had not been technically obliged to warn the United States about the strike because the missile used had been intermediate-range rather than intercontinental, but added that Moscow had informed the U.S. 30 minutes before the launch anyway.

Russian military expert Anatoly Matviychuk said it could carry six to eight conventional or nuclear warheads, and was probably already in service.

Putin said the missile travelled at 10 times the speed of sound [Mach 10] and so could not be intercepted, with Russian sources saying the range was 3,1000 miles.

It also appeared to have multiple independently targetable re-entry vehicles: separate warheads able to hit different targets.

“The flight time of this Russian missile from the moment of its launch in the Astrakhan region to its impact in the city of Dnipro was 15 minutes,” Ukraine’s Main Directorate of Intelligence (HUR) said in a statement on Friday.

“The missile was equipped with six warheads: each equipped with six submunitions. The speed at the final part of the trajectory was over Mach 11.”

HUR added that the weapon was “likely from the ‘Kedr’ missile complex.” Kedr is a Russian ICBM missile programme, which also contains a number of other ballistic missile projects.

Ukraine’s air force initially said the missile was an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) – the kind that Russia could hit the United States with.

But the US military later said the weapon was an intermediate-range missile based on the design of Russia’s longer-range RS-26 ICBM missile.

The Pentagon said it was fired with a conventional warhead but Moscow could modify it if it wanted, with Russia only possessing a handful of them.

“It could be refitted to certainly carry different types of conventional or nuclear warheads,” Pentagon spokesperson Sabrina Singh said.

Russia’s Defence Ministry claimed on Friday that all of the missile’s warheads had hit their targets and hailed what it said was its first successful use of an intermediate-range hypersonic ballistic missile with conventional warheads in combat.