Ukraine war updates: Defence budget hike ‘absolutely necessary’ – Moscow

President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has appointed former Ukrainian football great Andriy Shevchenko as a special adviser and British actor Mark Strong as an ambassador to the charity the president set up to raise money for Ukraine.

It was not clear what Shevchenko’s duties as adviser to the president would entail but the former star striker for Ukraine and squads across Europe suggested it would expand on his work as ambassador of United24, a charity Zelenskyy created after Russia’s invasion in 2022.

Strong, who starred in the Kingsman movies and Deep State TV show, was appointed as an ambassador of United24. Zelenskyy thanked him for his support of Ukraine since the invasion, according to the president’s website.

Military strongman Khalifa Haftar, whose forces dominate eastern Libya, held talks with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Moscow on Thursday, his forces and the Kremlin have said.

Haftar, who sponsors a rival administration to Libya’s UN-backed government in Tripoli, has long cultivated close relations with Moscow and relies heavily on Russian mercenary group Wagner for military support.

Haftar’s abortive 2019 assault on the seat of the UN-backed government relied heavily on Wagner mercenaries but failed to overcome its Turkish-backed armed forces.

Since an October 2020 ceasefire brought the offensive to an end, Wagner has redeployed some of its personnel to Mali and Ukraine.

But despite repeated UN Security Council resolutions calling for the withdrawal of all foreign military forces from Libya, hundreds of Wagner personnel remain stationed in the east as well as in areas of the desert south under Haftar’s control.

Ukrainian Defence Minister Rustem Umerov has said he and his French counterpart are focused on boosting cooperation in terms of training Kyiv’s armed forces and in the technical field.

“Dozens of projects have either been launched or are under discussion, aimed at organising joint production of new weapons or maintenance of weapons already with us,” Umerov told a news conference alongside France’s Defence Minister Sebastien Lecornu.

The two countries, he said, were considering the establishment of a fund “to support joint ventures with our partners and companies which want to begin production in Ukraine”.

France and Ukraine, Lecornu said, would consider “what we can do together in terms of [arms] acquisition or production”. And Paris would maintain its current levels of training Ukrainian soldiers – more than 7,000 this year.

Swedish prosecutors have urged a prison sentence of up to five years for a Russian-Swedish citizen accused of passing Western technology to Russia’s military.

Sergei Skvortsov, who was arrested in a dawn raid on his suburban Stockholm home in November 2022, has lived in Sweden since the 1990s, running import-export companies.

The 60-year-old is charged with committing two counts of “unlawful intelligence activities” against the United States and Sweden over the course of the decade before his arrest.

Sweden’s charge of “unlawful intelligence activities” is a notch lower than espionage.

Prosecutors have argued that Skvortsov was part of a vast Russian organisation built to acquire technology off limits to Moscow because of international sanctions.

The verdict is to be announced on October 26, the court said.

Warsaw has denied that any of its helicopters crossed the border with Belarus.

“The Operational Command unequivocally denies these reports,” a spokesperson of the Operational Command of the Armed Forces told Reuters on Thursday. “None of the Polish helicopters crossed the airspace of Belarus.”

A missile that killed two people in a Polish village in November belonged to Kyiv’s forces, Warsaw has said.

Polish Justice Minister Zbigniew Ziobro said on Thursday that an “investigation carried out by Polish prosecutors led to … an unequivocal opinion… that this missile was Ukrainian”.

Two workers at a grain drying facility died in the blast in Przewodow, some 6km (4 miles) from the Ukrainian border, raising fears of an escalation in the war between Moscow and Kyiv.

But Warsaw and the NATO military alliance, of which Poland is a member, later said the explosion was likely caused by a Ukrainian air-defence missile launched to intercept a Russian barrage.

French Defence Minister Sebastien Lecornu visited Kyiv on Thursday and discussed the possibility of joint weapons production during talks with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, the president’s office has said.

“I discussed with your ministers very specifically how French industry can help you. We, of course, will continue this work,” Lecornu said in a video published by Zelenskyy on Telegram messenger.

Lecornu and Zelenskiy discussed bolstering Ukraine’s air defences ahead of winter, the president’s office said in a statement. Kyiv fears Russia will conduct a campaign of air strikes on critical energy infrastructure this winter.

Ukraine’s president said he was grateful to French President Emmanuel Macron for military assistance. He highlighted in particular the supply of antiaircraft missile systems, Caesar self-propelled artillery units and Scalp cruise missiles.

Belarus has said that a Polish helicopter violated its airspace.

“Around 1520 [12:20 GMT] the aircraft crossed the border of the Republic of Belarus, flew to a depth of up to 1.5 kilometres. At 1622 [13:22 GMT], the helicopter repeatedly violated the state border, going 300 metres deep,” the Ministry of Defence of Belarus said in its Telegram channel on Thursday.

Belarus, Russia’s closest ally, said it had scrambled military aircraft in response.

The European Union has extended the right of refugees from Ukraine to stay in the bloc by a year to March 2025, as Russia’s war against their country rages on.

The EU triggered its temporary protection directive days after Moscow’s February 2022 invasion to allow the millions of people fleeing Ukraine to remain.

“The EU will support the Ukrainian people for as long as it takes,” said Spanish Interior Minister Fernando Grande-Marlaska, whose country holds the EU’s rotating presidency.

“The prolongation of the protection status offers certainty to the more than four million refugees who have found a safe haven in the EU,” he said on Thursday.

The measure gives Ukrainians in the EU access to the job market, medical care and education.

Countries have imposed restrictions on the food they export to protect their own supplies from the combined effect of the war in Ukraine, El Nino’s threat to food production and increasing damage from climate change.

Globally, 41 food export restrictions from 19 countries are in effect, ranging from outright bans to taxes, according to the International Food Policy Research Institute.

These restrictions have meant that households around the world are facing shortages of essential foods like rice, cooking oil and onions.

Experts say food stocks that the world is able to draw on have diminished in the past two years and that increased volatility is now the “new normal”.

German inflation slowed in September to the lowest level since the outbreak of the Ukraine war, data shows, offering a glimmer of hope even as Europe’s top economy struggles to emerge from a recession.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine last year and subsequent moves to slash crucial gas exports triggered an energy crisis and sent consumer prices surging in Europe, with Germany particularly hard hit.

But inflation came in at 4.5 percent year-on-year this month, down from 6.1 percent in August, according to preliminary data from national statistics agency Destatis, with sharply lower energy costs contributing.

The last time inflation was lower was in February 2022, the month Russia sent its forces into Ukraine, it said.

North Korean leader Kim Jong Un has called for an exponential increase in the production of nuclear weapons and for his country to play a larger role in a coalition of nations confronting the United States in what he described as a “new Cold War”.

State media say Kim made the comments during a two-day session of the North’s parliament, which amended the constitution to include his policy of expanding the country’s military nuclear programme.

The Supreme People’s Assembly meetings came after Kim travelled to Russia this month on a trip that sparked Western concerns about a possible arms alliance in which North Korea would provide Russia with munitions for its war on Ukraine in exchange for advanced weapons technologies.

Chinese importers are believed to have made large purchases of animal feed corn from Ukraine in the past two weeks, traders in Asia and Europe have said, providing a boost for the war-ravaged country from an unlikely source.

The traders were unable to say the exact volumes but several said on Thursday that they amounted to several hundred thousand metric tonnes. Some estimates from European traders ranged from 500,000 to one million tonnes for shipment between October and December.

A Ukrainian government source also confirmed corn sales to China, a key ally of Russia, particularly since Moscow’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.

“I cannot tell you the volume, but I know that many [traders] did it and it is a good trend [for Ukrainian corn],” the source said.

Russia has tried to impose a de facto blockade on seaborne Ukrainian grain exports through the Black Sea. Its exit from a UN-backed safe shipping corridor in July has made the Danube River Ukraine’s main grain export route and Moscow has been bombing port infrastructure along the river for months.

Russia has decided to cut its state borrowing plan by 1 trillion roubles ($10.32bn) this year, Finance Minister Anton Siluanov said on Thursday, keen not to overpay as high rates have increased banks’ appetite for premiums.

The central bank hiked rates to 13 percent this month, as the weak rouble added to already stubborn inflationary pressures from high consumer lending, labour shortages and a wide budget deficit.

“We have consulted within the finance ministry, in the government, and decided to limit the borrowing plan this year, by around 1 trillion roubles to reduce the programme,” Siluanov said. “Let (banks) now sit and lend to the economy, rather than the budget.”

Russian shelling damaged a combined heat and power station in southern Ukraine overnight, the Ukrainian energy ministry said.

Ukraine’s national grid operator, Ukrenergo, had earlier on Thursday described the plant as a thermal power station but an energy ministry statement said all thermal power plants in territory controlled by Ukraine were in operation.

The ministry said the station had not been in operation at the time of the attack, and a warehouse had caught fire. The blaze was subsequently extinguished, it added.

Between October 2022 and February 2023, Russia specifically targeted power plants and energy distribution systems across Ukraine. In recent months Kyiv has frequently warned its allies that Russia will resume such attacks in the winter months as it called for support in boosting air defence systems.

Vladimir Putin said on Thursday that elections conducted this month in Russian-held parts of Ukraine marked a step towards their full integration into Russia.

The votes in the Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson and Zaporizhia regions – all partly under Russia’s control following its full-scale invasion of Ukraine last year – were denounced by Kyiv as illegal.

Russia said a year ago that it was annexing the four regions, in an act condemned as unlawful by most countries at the United Nations.

“This is, of course, a significant event, an important step towards the full entry of the new regions into the single legal, state space of our big country,” Putin told a meeting of newly elected governors, referring to the recent elections and describing them as fair.

Germany should not fear that Kazakhstan will try to help Russia circumvent Western sanctions imposed over its invasion of Ukraine, Kazakh President Tokayev has said after talks with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz in Berlin.

Tokayev said Kazakhstan continued to call for talks between Russia and Ukraine on ending the war, now in its 20th month, and that it had no concerns about Moscow threatening its own territorial integrity.

The large former Soviet state in Central Asia shares a long border with Russia and is home to a large ethnic Russian minority.

A few further details have emerged regarding Russian President Vladimir Putin’s meeting with Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov on Thursday.

A short video clip posted by TV reporter Pavel Zarubin showed the two men exchanging opening remarks, with no reference to the incident which occurred three days ago in which Kadyrov said he was proud of his 15-year-son Adam for beating up prisoner Nikita Zhuravel, who had been accused of burning the Quran.

The alleged burning did not occur in Chechnya, but Russian investigators said they transferred Zhuravel to Chechen custody because Muslims there saw themselves as victims of the incident.

During the meeting, Putin said that there was a “positive dynamic” in Chechnya, largely thanks to Kadyrov and his team. Kadyrov was then seen handing him some papers from a file.

Ukrainian state-owned oil and gas firm Naftogaz, aiming to cover the country’s needs with domestic production, has brought five new gas wells into operation, the company says.

Ukraine has not imported natural gas directly from Russia since 2015, opting to buy gas from the EU and stepping up efforts to increase domestic production.

Naftogaz traditionally has not disclosed the location of the wells, but most of Ukraine’s gas fields are in the Kharkiv and Poltava regions that have come under frequent missile fire since the full-scale Russian invasion in February 2022.

Naftogaz is Ukraine’s largest gas producer, with output of 12.5 billion cubic metres (bcm) in 2022. It plans to increase output to 13.5bcm in 2023 and to 14bcm in 2014.

During an unannounced visit to Kyiv, NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg says Ukrainian forces are “gradually gaining ground” in their counteroffensive against Russia.

Speaking at a joint press conference with Zelenskyy, Stoltenberg also said Russian troops were fighting for Moscow’s “imperial delusions”.

He added that NATO has framework contracts in place for 2.4 billion euros ($2.53bn) of ammunition for Ukraine, including 1 billion euros ($1.05bn) in firm orders.