Ukraine-Russia war live: Frontline ‘very, very difficult’, says Zelensky as Putin issues new conscription order

Russia and China are engaged in a secret weapons programme to produce long-range drones against Ukraine, a report claims.

A subsidiary of Russian state-owned weapons company Almaz-Antey, IEMZ Kupol, have allegedly developed a new drone model called Garpiya-3 (G3) in China, according to documents seen by news agencyReuters and sources they have spoken to.

The documents are said to show Kupol told the Russian Defence Ministry that it was able to produce drones including the G3 at scale at a factory in China – with the help of local specialists.

Vuhledar – which means “gift of coal” – is a coal mining town in eastern Ukraine’s Donetsk region with a pre-war population of around 14,000 people, nearly all of whom have fled.

It was built by the Soviet Union in the mid 1960s around a mine. There are two mines there now with significant coal reserves.

Russians call the town, which sits on a flat plain and is comprised of high-rise apartment buildings and other structures, Ugledar.

Moscow says the Donetsk region is one of four Ukrainian regions it has annexed since 2022, a claim Kyiv rejects as illegal.

Moscow sees taking control of Vuhledar as an important stepping stone to incorporating the entire region into Russia.

Control of the town – which Russians long regarded as one of Ukraine’s toughest fortified positions to crack – is considered important by both sides because of its position on elevated ground and because it sits at the intersection of the eastern and southern battlefield fronts giving it added significance when it comes to supplying both sides’ forces.

While Ukrainian forces were in full control of Vuhledar, they were able to use the town as a platform to shell Russian military supply lines in the area.

The town sits close to a railway line from Crimea, the Black Sea peninsula which Russia annexed from Ukraine in 2014, to Ukraine’s industrialised Donbas region which comprises Donetsk and the eastern region of Luhansk, most of which Moscow controls.

Taking Vuhledar, which Russia portrays as one of the last Ukrainian strongholds in southern Donetsk, would open the way for Russian forces to advance on other places.

Russian troops have reached the centre of Vuhledar, a bastion on strategic high ground in eastern Ukraine that has resisted Russian assaults since Moscow’s full-scale invasion, the regional governor of Ukraine’s Donetsk region said on Tuesday.

Vadym Filashkin, the governor, said the situation in Vuhledar was extremely difficult.

“The enemy is already nearly in the centre of the city,” Filashkin told Ukrainian TV.

Russian forces reached the outskirts of the small mining town last week and intensified their offensive push in recent days.

Moscow’s troops in eastern Ukraine advanced at their fastest rate in two years in August, according to multiple open-source maps. Their relentless advance in the Ukrainian east comes despite Ukraine’s surprise incursion into Russia’s Kursk region

Russia must prepare for a long confrontation with the United States and has sent repeated warnings to Washington over the crisis in relations, Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov warned.

The Ukraine war has triggered the gravest confrontation between Russia and the West since the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis.

The conflict is entering what Russian officials say is the most dangerous phase to date. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy has been urging Kyiv’s allies for months to let Ukraine fire longer-range Western missiles deep into Russia to limit Moscow’s ability to launch attacks.

Mr Ryabkov, who oversees arms control and relations with Washington, said Moscow had no illusions about relations, given the “bipartisan anti-Russian consensus” in the United States.

“We must prepare for a long-term confrontation with this country. We are ready for this in every sense,” Mr Ryabkov was quoted as saying by state news agency RIA.

New Nato chief Mark Rutte has doubled down on his commitment to Ukraine as he takes charge at a critical time for the Western alliance.

The former Dutch prime minister replaced Jens Stoltenberg as Nato secretary general on Tuesday, where he pledged continued support for Kyiv’s fight against Russia.

Mr Rutte’s appointment comes just before a pivotal US presidential election in November, with Nato-sceptic Donald Trump, who declined to say whether he wants Ukraine to win the war, on the Republican ticket.

“We have to make sure that Ukraine prevails as a sovereign, independent, democratic nation,”  Mr Rutte said at Nato’s headquarters in Brussels, Belgium.

Speaking about the prospect of former US president Donald Trump’s re-election, Mr Rutte added: “I’m not worried.

“I worked for four years with Donald Trump. He was the one pushing us to spend more on defence and he achieved this.

“Because indeed, at the moment, we are now at a much higher spending level than we were when he took office.”

New Nato chief Mark Rutte said he was determined to prepare the transatlantic alliance for the challenges of the future.

He added that the group must deliver on the promises it made to Ukraine to help the country in its war against Russia. The conflict in Ukraine is not contained to the front lines, Mr Rutte said.