Ukraine-Russia war latest: Zelensky claims Ukrainian troops ‘gradually pushing back’ Putin’s forces in Sumy

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.

Foreign ministers from large European countries have said they are ready to step up pressure on Russia at a meeting in Rome.

The meeting was attended by officials from France, Germany, Italy, Poland, Spain, Britain and the European Union.

Nato secretary general Mark Rutte and a Ukrainian representative also joined the talks.

“We reiterated our readiness to step up our pressure on Russia as it continues to refuse serious and credible commitments, including through further sanctions and countering their circumvention,” the foreign ministers’ statement said.

Russian forces are likely attempting to level the frontlines in the Novopavlivka and Kurakhove directions to advance into Dnipropetrovsk oblast where Moscow’s offensive has picked pace in the recent days, a Washington-based think tank said.

“Russian forces first crossed the Donetsk-Dnipropetrovsk Oblast border northwest of Horikhove (northwest of Ukrainka and southeast of Novopavlivka) as of 9 June and will likely seek to secure further advances to level the current salients near Horikhove and Novoukrainka,” the Institute for the Study of War said.

It added that a Kremlin-affiliated Russian milblogger claimed that Russian forces “also seek to even out the frontline near Udachne (northeast of Novopavlivka along the T-0406 Pokrovsk-Mekhova highway) and Muravka (southeast of Udachne and north of Horikhove)”.

Ukrainian Southern Defence Forces spokesperson Colonel Vyacheslav Voloshyn also reported on Wednesday that Russian forces are using motorcycles in assaults to try to advance quickly and make it difficult for Ukraine to reinforce the area.

“Kremlin officials and Russian commentators have framed Russian efforts to advance into Dnipropetrovsk Oblast as efforts to create a ”buffer zone,” indicating that Russia continues to have wider territorial ambitions in Ukraine beyond the areas it has illegally annexed,” the ISW said.

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”.