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Since the start of the war, Western allies have asked Ukraine to refrain from using their donated weapons to strike deep inside Russia. Ukraine urgently needs the West's go-ahead to launch attacks on Russian territory with donated weapons, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said on Tuesday after signing a long-term security deal with Belgium that includes the provision of 30 F-16s fighter jets by 2028. The deal, however, prohibits Ukraine from deploying the sought-after aircraft to strike targets located on Russian soil. This follows a long-held policy by Western allies that compels Kyiv to use donated weapons and ammunition strictly within its...

Poland has signed a $735 million contract with the U.S. for the supply of JASSM-ER missiles, Defense Minister Wladyslaw Kosiniak-Kamysz said on Tuesday. The country is spending heavily to bolster its armed forces since Russia's invasion of Ukraine. Warsaw is spending around 4% of its gross domestic product on defense this year and last week announced an agreement with the U.S. The missiles have a range of around 621 miles, according to the defense ministry.

Poland’s foreign minister says the NATO nation should not exclude the possibility of sending troops to Ukraine and should keep Russian President Vladimir Putin in suspense over whether such a decision would ever be made. Radek Sikorski made the comments in an interview published Tuesday in the Gazeta Wyborcza daily. “We should not exclude any option. Let Putin be guessing as to what we will do,” Sikorski said when asked whether he would send Polish troops to Ukraine. But a spokesperson for Poland’s Defense Ministry, Janusz Sejmej, told Polish media on Tuesday he had “no knowledge of that”

Against the backdrop of continuing Russian advances, some Western leaders have started to advocate missile strikes inside Russian territory, from NATO’s Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg up to chief warmonger, former British Premier Boris Johnson: Now, some European neighboring countries have started preparing to introduce their troops into Ukraine in case of strategic Russian advances in Eastern Ukraine. The Baltic states and Poland have warned Germany that they could send troops to Ukraine if the situation gets noticeably worse for Kiev due to its allies being reluctant to supply it with weapons.

KYIV (Reuters) -A Ukrainian drone targeted a long-range radar deep inside Russia on Sunday, the second such strike in a week on infrastructure used by Moscow to monitor Ukraine’s military activities, a Kyiv intelligence source said. The source said the strike was aimed at a “Voronezh M” radar near the city of Orsk in the Orenburg region some 1,500 km from the closest territory held by Kyiv’s forces. The source, who declined to be named, did not say if there was any damage, but the move would make it one of the deepest attempted drone strikes in Russian territory since...

Ukraine's top commander said on Monday he had signed paperwork allowing French military instructors to visit Ukrainian training centres soon. "I am pleased to welcome France's initiative to send instructors to Ukraine to train Ukrainian servicemen," Oleksandr Syrskyi said on the Telegram messaging app after talks via video link with French defence minister Sebastien Lecornu. "I have already signed the documents that will enable the first French instructors to visit our training centres shortly and familiarize themselves with their infrastructure and personnel." Syrskyi gave no further details but said he believed that France's determination would encourage other partners to join...

A Ukrainian drone strike on a Russian radar station that can track nuclear missiles has sparked alarm in the West. Kyiv hit the Armavir radar station in the Krasnodar border region on May 23, damaging the state-of-the-art facility, which provides conventional air-defence as well as forming part of Moscow’s nuclear warning system. Ukrainian officials confirmed on Saturday that their forces had carried out the strike, saying the facility monitors airspace over the country and occupied Crimea. The radar station has reportedly been able to track long-range Atacms missiles, delivered by the US to Ukraine earlier this year. Mauro Gilli, a...

NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg has said Ukraine should be allowed to use Western-supplied weapons in strikes against military targets inside Russia. In an interview with The Economist published on May 24, the NATO head called on members to “consider whether they should lift” their current restrictions, saying they make it “very hard” for Ukraine to defend itself.

Ukrainian attack on annexed Crimea using U.S.-supplied missiles is reported to have struck a space radar station used by occupying Russian forces. The local Crimean Wind Telegram channel reported on Friday that Kyiv's forces attacked military installations in Crimea on Thursday evening. At least six ATACMS ballistic missiles hit a communications center used by the Russian army that houses "a radio antenna of a space observation station," it said. Newsweek could not independently verify the report and has contacted Russia's Defense Ministry for comment by email.

US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen on Thursday urged G7 ministers meeting in Italy to consider “more ambitious options” to use frozen Russian assets to help Ukraine. The ministers and central bankers from the Group of Seven world powers are meeting in Stresa, on the shores of northern Italy’s Lake Maggiore, to prepare for a summit of G7 heads of state next month in Puglia. Yellen said the group would also discuss what Washington considers to be “overcapacity” of key green technologies from China such as electric vehicles, batteries and solar panels. Top of the agenda is a plan to finance...

A map of Russian territory has been trotted out by House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Michael McCaul as a prop in Congress, as seen from footage published by C-SPAN. McCaul was fervently advocating dropping US restrictions for Ukraine to hit targets inside Russia. McCaul rattled off a list of weapons funneled to the Kiev regime, including long-range Army Tactical Missile Systems (ATACMS) and HIMARS, claiming that restrictions on their use meant that Ukrainians had “they hands tied behind their backs.”

Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) on Wednesday appeared to back allowing Ukraine to use American-provided weapons to strike Russia or Russian-controlled territory. One reporter asked Johnson about a House Intelligence Committee letter calling on the Biden administration to allow Ukraine to strike Russia with American-supplied weapons. The letter stipulates that this would allow Ukraine to strike “Russian-controlled territory” as well as Russian territory and represents a significant escalation in America’s seemingly endless proxy war against Russia.

“I think that if the attacks are coming from directly over the line in Russia then those targets ought to be fair game…”

Western allies are taking too long to make key decisions on military support for Ukraine, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy told Reuters in an exclusive interview in Kyiv on Monday. He also said he was pushing partners to get more directly involved in the war by helping to intercept Russian missiles over Ukraine and allowing Kyiv to use Western weapons against enemy military equipment amassing near the border. The call to accelerate aid and push so-called "red lines" of engagement in the conflict reflect the growing pressure Zelenskyy's forces are under along more than 1,000 km of front lines in the northeast,...

Russia on Tuesday announced the start of tactical nuclear weapons drills close to Ukraine, in what it said was a response to Western "threats". Throughout its two-year offensive on Ukraine, Moscow has repeatedly talked-up its arsenal of nuclear weapons and its readiness to deploy them if it senses an existential threat. The West has accused President Vladimir Putin of irresponsible nuclear sabre-rattling. Russia's defence ministry said Tuesday the drills were taking place in its Southern Military District, which borders and includes parts of Ukraine that Moscow claims to have annexed. It did not specify exactly where.

This list only includes destroyed vehicles and equipment of which photo or videographic evidence is available. Therefore, the amount of equipment destroyed is significantly higher than recorded here. Loitering munitions, drones used as unmanned bait, civilian vehicles and derelict equipment are not included in this list. All possible effort has gone into avoiding duplicate entries and discerning the status of equipment between captured or abandoned. Many of the entries listed as 'abandoned' will likely end up captured or destroyed. Similarly, some of the captured equipment might be destroyed if it can't be recovered. When a vehicle is captured and then...

Russian central bank assets. Czech Foreign Minister Jan Lipavsky said the move will hand Ukraine up to €3 billion (about $3.3 billion) this year. "We have approved in the EU using revenues from Russia's central bank's frozen assets to help Ukraine," wrote Lipavsky on X, formerly Twitter. "Up to €3B only this year, 90% goes for Ukraine's military. Russia must pay for its war damages." The financial assets were frozen shortly after Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. Reuters reported this month that the EU has estimated that by 2027, windfall profits from Russia's central bank...

Senior officials from the Biden administration held indirect talks last week with the Iranian regime in the Gulf state of Oman to avoid “escalation” in the region — even as Iran’s proxies continue to attack Israel and global shipping. The effort is one of few diplomatic meetings between the U.S. and Iran, and recalls the secret meetings between President Barack Obama’s envoys and the Iranian regime in Oman in 2013 that set the stage for the Iran nuclear deal.

Kyiv says it has had some success pushing back against a renewed Russian offensive, but Ukraine's defences are in dire need of resupply. A massive Ukrainian drone attack on Crimea early Friday caused power cutoffs in the city of Sevastopol and set a refinery ablaze in southern Russia, Russian authorities said. The drone raids marked an attempt to strike back during Moscow's renewed offensive in northeastern Ukraine, which has added to the pressure on outnumbered and outgunned Ukrainian forces as they await delayed deliveries of crucial Western weapons and ammunition. Ukraine has not commented on the attack nor claimed responsibility...

Ukrainian drones attacked the only large oil refinery on Russia's Black Sea coast on Friday morning, authorities said. The attack on the Rosneft-owned refinery in the southern Russian town of Tuapse was reported by local authorities, who said a fire had broken out at the facility and that emergency services were working to extinguish the blaze. -snip- The Russian Black Sea naval port of Novorossiysk and Crimea's Sevastopol were also targeted a the massive aerial assault, which Russia's defense ministry said involved at least 100 drones.