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

At least six people were killed and three were injured in an alleged Russian artillery strike in a busy market in the southern Ukrainian city of Kherson yesterday.

The attack came on the same morning Ukrainians across the country were observing a minute’s silence for their military and war dead.

The strike happened as shoppers made their way between stalls at the city centre market, regional governor Oleksandr Prokudin said.

He published a video showing the blurred corpses of people in civilian clothes lying near a stall with tomatoes and other vegetables.

Ukraine’s general prosecutor’s office said the strike was “most likely” carried out by Russian artillery and hit close to a public transport stop.

It initially reported that seven people were killed but later corrected that toll to six, saying a severely wounded person thought to be dead was in intensive care at a local hospital.

Ukraine successfully tested its own ballistic missile and has exponentially ramped up domestic ammunition production, president Volodymyr Zelensky said.

Addressing Ukraine’s second international defence industry forum, Mr Zelensky said Ukraine produced 25 times more artillery and mortar ammunition so far this year than in the entire year of 2022.

“The total number of drones we are now capable of producing annually in Ukraine is 4 million, with more than 1.5 million already contracted,” he said.

Mr Zelensky also touched on the advancement of long-range weaponry, highlighting Ukraine’s Palianytsia missile-drone and domestically developed ballistic missile.

“Our new ballistic missile has successfully completed flight tests,” he announced.

He had initially revealed that Ukraine tested its own ballistic missile in late August, though specific details of the project remain undisclosed.

Britain said it sanctioned 16 members of the Russian cyber-crime gang Evil Corp, a group it said had been tasked by Russia to conduct operations against Nato allies.

Evil Corp was once believed to be the most significant cyber-crime threat in the world, Britain’s National Crime Agency (NCA) said after taking coordinated action with officials in the United States and Australia.

“Today’s sanctions send a clear message to the Kremlin that we will not tolerate Russian cyber-attacks – whether from the state itself or from its cyber-criminal ecosystem,” foreign minister David Lammy said in a statement.

In 2019, the US indicted and sanctioned Evil Corp’s alleged leader, the Lamborghini-driving Maksim Yakubets, and put a $5m bounty out for information leading to his arrest.

In its latest disclosure, the NCA said the group had been tasked by Russian intelligence services to conduct cyber-attacks and espionage operations against Nato allies, although it gave no further details.

Yakubets, it said, had worked with Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB), Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) and military intelligence unit GRU.

Ukraine said it had launched an investigation into what it said was an apparent shooting of 16 Ukrainian prisoners of war by Russian soldiers.

The soldiers who were allegedly killed had surrendered on the eastern Ukrainian frontline.

“This is the largest reported case of the execution of Ukrainian POWs on the front line and yet another indication that the killing and torture of prisoners of war are not isolated incidents,” Ukraine’s prosecutor general Andriy Kostin said on X.

“This is a deliberate policy of the Russian military and political leadership.”

Moscow did not immediately comment on the accusations. The Kremlin denies that Russia commits war crimes in Ukraine.

The Ukraine prosecutor general office said on the Telegram messaging app that it was looking into a video shared on social media showing the alleged killing.

A video with grainy drone footage purported to show a group of more than ten people leaving a trench. They are lined up and then fall down after being fired upon by other, indistinct figures.

Mr Kostin said the incident took place on the Pokrovsk front, an area of intensified Russian assaults.

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

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.”

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.