Russia-Ukraine war: Putin’s forces suffering significant losses in east as Kyiv strikes Russian border – live

Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky spoke to his Polish counterpart Andrzej Duda and discussed Polish support of Ukraine’s defence needs, Kyiv said.

The statement did not mention the blockade of Ukraine’s border by Polish farmers and truckers, which started in November and has caused significant disruption to Ukraine’s economy.

In September, Warsaw said it would stop exporting weapons to Ukraine and would instead invest the money in arming Poland, which has been one of Ukraine’s staunchest allies since Russia invaded last year, with the most “modern weapons”.

The row between the neighbouring countries began when Poland imposed an import ban on Ukrainian grain, including wheat and maize, after an EU-brokered deal expired.

The deal, which ended on 15 September 2023, allowed Poland, Bulgaria, Romania, Hungary and Slovakia to ban the sale of Ukrainian grain, which they claim has flooded the European market and undercut domestic grain prices since Putin’s invasion, damaging their economies.

But Ukraine launched a legal challenge at the World Trade Organisation (WTO) on Monday after Poland reinstated the ban, claiming the country had failed to meet its “international obligations”.

Hundreds of Russian soldiers have defected from Vladimir Putin’s army using an “I want to live” hotline set up by Ukraine, military intelligence officials in Kyiv have revealed.

Created just days before Russia’s partial mobilisation of 300,000 reservists in September 2022, the hotline has reportedly received tens of thousands of calls and has led to 220 soldiers defecting to Ukraine.

Kyiv’s military intelligence unit (GUR), which launched the initiative, said a website that accompanies the hotline has been visited more than 48 million times in 15 months.

Jailed Putin critic Alexei Navalny quipped that there was nothing more invigorating than a walk in freezing Yamal, Siberia, in the early hours of the morning, following his exile to a remote penal colony in December.

After weeks of speculation around his wellbeing, Mr Navalny was tracked down to the IK-3 penal colony in Kharp in the Yamal-Nenets region, about 1,200 miles northeast of Moscow, last month.

But in a Telegram message, Mr Navalny has joked about the freezing conditions and the walks he has to do during the early hours of the morning.

“It has not been colder than -32C yet. Nothing quite invigorates you like a walk in Yamal at 6.30am in the morning. Even at this temperature, you can walk for more than half an hour only if you manage to grow a new nose, new ears and new fingers,” he said.

Ukraine’s power grid operator has said severe winter weather has left more than 1,000 towns and villages without electricity in nine regions.

Electricity consumption was at this week’s highest levels as temperatures fell to about -15C in many parts of the country, grid operator Ukrenergo said.

“The consumption level continues to grow due to the considerable drop in temperature across the country,” it said on the Telegram messaging app, adding that electricity consumption in the morning was already 5.8 per cent higher than the day before.

The war between Israel and Hamas is taking attention away from the Ukraine conflict, the UK foreign secretary has said.

“It is certainly taking attention away from Ukraine, which I think is a pity,” Lord Cameron told MPs at the foreign affairs select committee.

“I think it’s the job of the strongest supporters of Ukraine – of which I would say Britain is rightly one – to do everything we can to keep it as high up the agenda as possible,” he added.

A US citizen has been arrested on drug charges in Russia amid tensions between Washington and Moscow over Putin’s war in Ukraine.

Robert Woodland Romanov, who is reported to have been born in Russia and later adopted by an American couple, was ordered to remain in custody for two months on charges of preparing to get involved in illegal drug trafficking pending an official investigation.

It comes as Washington has sought to win the release of jailed Americans Paul Whelan and journalist Evan Gershkovich, but said offers so far have been rejected by the Kremlin.

A Ukrainian poet who was serving as a volunteer on the war frontline against Russia’s invasion has been killed, his mother said in a Facebook post, Arpan Rai reports.

The writers association PEN Ukraine also confirmed the death of poet Maksym Kryvtsov.

“Poet and soldier Maksym Kryvtsov died in the war. This was reported by his mother, and later by Ukrainian writers on their pages in social networks,” it said in a statement on Facebook on Sunday.

Russian operatives have been pictured wearing uniform patches bearing the name of a Soviet counter-intelligence agency set up by Joseph Stalin during the Second World War, Britain’s Ministry of Defence has said.

“In late 2023, Russian politicians claimed that the Soviet counter-intelligence (CI) organisation ’Smersh’ was being re-established. In early January 2024, an open-source image showed operatives apparently wearing Smersh uniform patches,” the ministry said.

“An abbreviation of the Russian phrase for ‘death to spies’, Joseph Stalin established the original organisation which existed from 1941-1946. In the West, it became known via its fictionalised portrayal in Ian Fleming’s James Bond books.

“It is unclear whether the new name indicates any substantive new capabilities or role for Russia’s CI function, or whether it is merely a re-badging. However, it provides another example of how the Russian authorities consciously couch the Russia-Ukraine conflict in the spirit of the Second World War, and their strong focus on the supposed infiltration of external threats into the country.”

The UK is to launch a £300m drive to push Vladimir Putin further out of the global energy market through an investment in hi-tech nuclear fuel, The Independent’s Whitehall editor Kate Devlin reports.

Ministers will vow to end what they say is Russia’s reign as the only commercial producer of a type of enriched uranium needed for the next generation of reactors.

It comes as the world prepares for the second anniversary of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine next month.