Latest news with #UkraineWar
Bloomberg
8 hours ago
- Business
- Bloomberg
Putin Says Russia to Seek Defense Cuts; How Much Depends on War
President Vladimir Putin said Russia plans to cut defense spending, acknowledging growing strains on the budget even as he insisted that reductions would depend on winning his war in Ukraine. Russia is spending 6.3% of gross domestic product on defense this year and 'that's a lot,' Putin told reporters in Minsk, Belarus, on Friday. 'It's one of the problems, including for the budget, that we have to resolve,' and Russia paid a price in inflation from the increased expenditure, he said.
Daily Mail
16 hours ago
- Politics
- Daily Mail
The pastry chef, lawyer and fast food boss shooting down Putin's drones with a WWI-era machine gun mounted on a truck from Leeds
The time is 3.15am and sunrise is still 90 minutes away. A crescent moon has been flitting between the clouds, and every ear is strained for the familiar hateful buzz of the next wave of Russian kamikaze drones. Instead, there comes a sound of unearthly beauty. The blue, rain-flecked beam of the mobile air defence unit's searchlight has confused the local skylarks into believing the day is dawning. And so, they begin their premature, heart-lifting chorus, even as sudden death flies in from the north-east. We are on the edge of a soya-bean field an hour from the Ukrainian capital, Kyiv. A second-hand Mitsubishi pick-up truck, which began working life in Leeds, West Yorkshire, is parked in a thicket of prickly lettuce. On the flat bed at the back, a heavy machine-gun designed during the First World War is trained at the sky. The gun crew is commanded by a former sports umpire called Yuri. Other members of his squad include a pastry chef, a vending-machine engineer, a fast-food entrepreneur and a lawyer. There is something profoundly moving about their dedication and camaraderie. Tomorrow they will return to their day jobs, but tonight they are the embattled capital's first line of air defence. All are from the big city, which is under aerial bombardment as never before. What gets past them, they know, is heading for their family homes. And yet, in this 21st-century war, their main weapons are often inadequate for this life-or-death task – the gun crews are like a small child reaching for a low-hanging apple he cannot quite touch. In the past fortnight, the world has seen how Israel's much-vaunted air-defence systems have sometimes struggled to shut out volleys of Iranian missiles and drones. Mass casualties have resulted. Consider, then, what has happened in the same period in Ukraine, where more civilians have been killed by air attacks than in Israel. Yet while Jerusalem is given what it needs by a supportive Trump administration, Ukraine struggles to make do. President Volodymyr Zelensky complained in April that Western allies had not provided anything close to the number of state-of-the-art, American-made Patriot missile batteries needed to protect Ukraine's cities against mass Russian attack. These shortages also extend to ammunition. Mr Zelensky recounted a call he got from an air defence commander who said his sole Patriot battery had run out of missiles entirely. Meanwhile, Russia turns the screw, ramping up urban blitzes to the most intense levels since this war began. On Tuesday this week, 22 civilians died in a rare daylight air attack on Dnipropetrovsk oblast, 250 miles south of Kyiv. Residents react after a Russian missile hit a multi-storey apartment during Russia's combined missile and drone air attack in Kyiv, Ukraine, Tuesday, June 17, 2025 The big recent raids have mostly been aimed at Kyiv, and almost always take place at night. Pictured: A residents reacts at the site of a destroyed apartment building But the big recent raids have mostly been aimed at Kyiv, and almost always take place at night. On Sunday night into Monday morning, nine civilians were killed here during another mass bombardment. The previous week, 23 died in one Kyiv apartment building alone during the heaviest blitz of the war, in which Russia launched 472 aerial weapons. The Russian ministry of defence issued a statement in the hours that followed which said: 'The objectives of the strikes were achieved. All designated targets were hit.' Tell that to the bereaved civilians of devastated Solomianskyi district. Ballistic and cruise missiles are the deadliest threats to residents here. But the workhorses of the Russian blitzes are the Geran-2 suicide drones, a Russian development of the Iranian-designed Shahed-136. These large, delta-winged, piston-engine weapons can carry a warhead of up to 90kg for more than 1,500 miles before plunging into a target. They're not fast, cruising at around 115mph, fly at relatively low altitudes and are noisy. Their distinctive buzzing sound, like a lawn mower or strimmer, has become the nocturnal bane of all urban Ukrainians, just as the Doodlebug was for Britons during the Second World War. It's only these drones, among the Russian aerial attack arsenal, that Yuri and his men have any realistic hope of hitting. This week, Mail cameraman Jamie Wiseman and I spent several nights with the gun crews of Territorial Community Volunteer Formation 24 'Left Bank', to witness the difficulties of their task. It's 9.14pm on a balmy evening and a report has just come through from HQ that the night's first wave of Geran kamikaze drones has been launched from Russian territory. Early-warning systems will take a while to determine the direction of their flight – they could be heading for Kyiv, Kharkiv to the east of us, or cities further south. In an hour, when the drones will still be 124 miles away, the duty truck crews here will leave for their designated firing positions. We are in a former village hall deep in the countryside, which serves as a base for Kyiv's mobile defence unit. Most of the main room is given over to workshop and storage space, while beyond a partition is a rest and dining area and a control desk at which the developing air raids are monitored on a digital map. Red symbols represent Russian drones and fast jets, and blue symbols are Ukrainian helicopter gunships and F-16 and MiG-29 interceptors. A solitary yellow symbol is our own fixed location. Painfully slowly, the reds move across the screen into Ukraine. When not studying the plots, the soldier at the desk is reading Alan Axelrod's Winston Churchill, CEO: 25 Lessons For Bold Business Leaders. Aside from Yuri, they are all part-time soldiers, like our Home Guard, although none of them are more than middle-aged. At least once a week, they knock off work, put on their uniforms and drive into the rural hinterland to serve a 24-hour shift taking on the drones. None of them knew each other before the invasion. Now three of them have the unit's badge tattooed on their arms or legs, along with the SAS motto in English, 'Who Dares Wins'. Food is supplied by the grateful villagers (the location was briefly occupied by the Russians in 2022), the men's wives and Rostock, the unit's day-time pastry chef. Outside, in the twilight, two anti-aircraft-gun trucks are parked beside a field of young maize. For now, their weapons remain covered with camouflage netting and tarpaulin. Each vehicle has a .50-calibre machine-gun of a design more than a century old that was once mounted in the Flying Fortress bombers of the Second World War. Yuri tells me that their guns can engage targets up to an altitude of 7,500ft. Drones have sometimes come over as low as 130ft, when the gunner's task is like extreme clay-pigeon shooting. 'First we use our ears and then our eyes,' says Yuri. 'Our machine guns are relatively slow-firing, and it might take anything up to 30 rounds to take down a drone. At best, you might see the target for about 20 seconds.' The most the unit has fired in one night is 150 rounds at three different Geran drones. The battalion has 30 confirmed kills, with more than 100 'probables'. Recently, however, Russian drones have taken to flying at 3,000m or more, which is beyond the unit's ability to engage. Yet while the unit cannot hit the drones, their presence has served to push the enemy to an altitude where they can be better seen and dealt with by more sophisticated air-defence systems. For the moment, the .50 calibre gun – or '.50 cal' – is the best weapon available to the men in the village hall. Every bit of equipment, apart from the guns and ammunition, is supplied by members of the unit and paid for out of their own pockets. Even the £2,500 thermal gun sights, without which they would be firing blind at night. 'We are defending our homes,' says Bohdan, the second-in-command, a lawyer by training who runs a rail logistics company. 'That is important psychologically. The cost is high, but the cause is important. We are our home city's first line of defence. We are directly protecting our families.' So far, one member of the unit has been killed, although not by drones. A comrade was blown up by a 'terrorist' bomb while manning a checkpoint. Two schoolboys had left the device in a bag next to his vehicle. The female Russian agent who had directed them escaped abroad before she, too, could be arrested. It's gone 10pm when there is a report of a second drone wave taking off. The gun-truck crews pack up and leave for their firing points in two remote locations some five miles apart. The hope is that the Russian drones will fly over them on their way to Kyiv. Out here, the night is still, aside from the bark of a farm dog. Then, at 11.04pm an air-raid siren goes off in a distant village. But it's a warning of a ballistic-missile attack on Kyiv, which the mobile unit has no hope of stopping. By 11.32pm it's clear from the crew's hand-held digital monitor that the drones in the air are concentrating on Kharkiv. The call comes to return to base, where we spend the rest of the night. The next night is filled with phantoms, loitering drones and strange creatures. Another squad is on duty, but Yuri is still in charge. At 10pm the message comes through that three drones are approaching, 19 miles away and closing. We race to a different firing point on the edge of a field. Tonight, the wind is strong and rain is in the air. My hands are cold, yet almost the longest day of the year. Low cloud will make the night darker – and engaging drones harder, encouraging them again to fly at altitude. 'We will have to rely on our ears,' Yuri says. At 10.35pm the monitor shows a 'target', as the men call the drones, within six miles. On our right horizon we can see the red light of a low-flying Ukrainian helicopter gunship as it also hunts the incoming drones. A peculiar krek-krek noise strikes up somewhere close by in the darkness, like a very large frog ratcheting. Then another answers it and they carry on back and forth for the rest of the night. While the men hunt the skies for Gerans, a pair of corn crakes are broadcasting a mating call that only another corn crake would love. 'Those birds drive us nuts,' says Volodymyr, an IT developer. 'The same horrible sound from sunset to sunrise, but we never see them.' He adds: 'It's funny how this war has made the wildlife tamer. We have deer approaching very close to us on our missions because there has been no hunting for three seasons now.' At 10.47pm the monitor reports a single target circling our position at a distance of two miles. Yuri says it could be a reconnaissance drone or a Geran that has been affected by the high winds or Ukrainian electronic warfare. Then the readings draw even closer, but are more confusing. The digital tracking map apparently shows several drones 'dancing' in circles, one as close as 800 yards, well within .50 cal range. But nothing can be seen or heard by the gun crew. They are probably phantoms, decoys, created by Russian electronic warfare to confuse and tie up the defences. Midnight approaches and the crew get the news that the helicopters we saw and other defensive flights have knocked down the drones that approached our sector. By 1.40am the second wave appears to be turned towards Poltava to the east. At 3.30am the order comes to return to base. Coffee and cold dumplings with spinach and cheese await. There is much good-natured ribbing and laughter. Yuri's seems a happy unit of citizen soldiers. At the end of their shift they will return to their families in the big city knowing they have been defenders for the past 24 hours. Daylight arrives at 4.45am and, with it, the more pleasant calls of cuckoos and cockerels. Two deer can be seen in a field beyond the maize. The rota is rearranged because two of the squad must attend their children's graduations 'and it only happens once in a lifetime', Harald explains. The following night we are in the centre of Kyiv when the Russians launch their latest, thunderous, mass attack on this city. Yuri's unit are out in the fields, and open fire twice. But, once again, the drones fly too high to be hit. This one-sided contest will change soon. Any day now, the unit will receive FPV interceptor drones that can fly at 250mph and at an altitude of 13,000ft. Guided by a pilot, these kamikaze air-defence weapons are designed to ram the Russian Gerans and bring them down. We watched the gun crews practise with virtual-reality headsets at the village hall. They will keep the venerable .50 cals, but very soon that small child will be tall enough to reach that apple. Kyiv will sleep a little more safely as a result.
Reuters
21 hours ago
- Business
- Reuters
Putin says Russia plans to cut military spending from next year
MOSCOW, June 27 (Reuters) - President Vladimir Putin said on Friday that Russia was looking to cut its military expenditure from next year, contrasting that with NATO's plan to ramp up defence spending over the next decade. NATO allies on Wednesday agreed to raise their collective spending goal to 5% of gross domestic product in the next 10 years, citing what they called the long-term threat posed by Russia and the need to strengthen civil and military resilience. In his first reaction to that move, Putin told a press conference in Minsk that the NATO spending would go on "purchases from the USA and on supporting their military-industrial complex", and this was NATO's business, not Russia's. "But now here is the most important thing. We are planning to reduce defence spending. For us, next year and the year after, over the next three-year period, we are planning for this," he said. Putin said there was no final agreement yet between the defence, finance and economy ministries, "but overall, everyone is thinking in this direction. And Europe is thinking about how to increase its spending, on the contrary. So who is preparing for some kind of aggressive actions? Us or them?" Putin's comments are likely to be greeted with extreme scepticism in the West, given that Russia has massively increased defence spending since the start of the Ukraine war. The conflict shows no sign of ending and has actually intensified in recent weeks, as negotiations have made no visible progress towards a ceasefire or a permanent settlement. Putin said Russia appreciated efforts by U.S. President Donald Trump to bring an end to the war. "He recently stated that it turned out to be more difficult than it seemed from the outside. Well, that's true," Putin said. Trump said this week that he believed Putin wanted to find a way to settle the conflict, but Ukraine and many of its European allies believe the Kremlin leader has no real interest in a peace deal and is intent on capturing more territory. Putin said Russian and Ukrainian negotiators were in constant contact, and Moscow was ready to return the bodies of 3,000 more Ukrainian soldiers. Russia is seeing a sharp slowdown in economic growth as the budget comes under pressure from falling energy revenues and the central bank is trying to bring down inflation. Russia hiked state spending on national defence by a quarter in 2025 to 6.3% of gross domestic product (GDP), the highest level since the Cold War. Defence spending accounts for 32% of total 2025 federal budget expenditure. Defence plants have been working round-the-clock for the past several years, and the state has spent heavily on bonuses to attract soldiers to sign up and on compensation for the families of those who are killed. Putin acknowledged that Russia had paid for the military spending increase with higher inflation. The finance ministry raised the 2025 budget deficit estimate to 1.7% of gross domestic product in April from 0.5% after reducing its energy revenues forecast by 24%, and it plans to tap into fiscal reserves this year to balance the budget. The next draft budget is due to appear in the autumn.
The Sun
21 hours ago
- Entertainment
- The Sun
Playboy model from iconic Pulp album cover has chilling link to Putin
A PLAYBOY model who featured on an iconic album cover has a surprising link to Russian tyrant Vladimir Putin. Ksenia Sobchak, 41, posed for the lads' mag in 2006 and was on the iconic cover of Pulp's 1998 album, This Is Hardcore. 4 4 But the glamorous socialite ditched her party-ways and remade herself into a journalist and liberal politician who has been accused of being a " Kremlin stooge" by opposition activists. She is Putin's goddaughter and the offspring of one of his first political mentors - the ex mayor of St. Petersburg, Anatoly A. Sobchak - who put him on the path to presidency. The unlikely pair have known each other since the 1990s when her dad launched Putin's political career. However, she has been vocal about being against the Ukraine war - and insists she helps residents of Russian border regions displaced by Ukrainian shelling. She and the President have reportedly have not spoken since the war began, nor seen each other. Sobchak now works as an influencer on YouTube, interviewing critics of the war. arrests of antiwar activists. In a conversation with her 9.5million Instagram fans about the conflict, she said: 'I believe that this is a horrific situation, but we're going to get through this time, we'll get through it together with our audience.' Navalny accused her of being a puppet opposition candidate to Putin - to give the illusion of democracy. She said at the time: "In a system created by Putin, it is only possible for Putin to win. "I am realistic about who will become the president." Sobchak was hit by further controversy in her media career in 2022 when she was hunted by Russianpolice over claims of extortion and tax fraud. At the time she claimed it was a "politically motivated move" when three of her former employees were accused of trying to extort money from the head of state-owned defense conglomerate Rostec. After fleeing cops in Moscow, she escaped to Lithuania via Belarus after police arrested her business partner. However, after returning to Russia, Sobchak visited the Rostec office to reconcile with boss Sergey Chemezov for the "actions of colleagues" accused of extortion and said "their fate will be decided by the court". When the three ex-employees were jailed for seven years, their former boss slammed the verdict as 'way more than injustice.' 'I've done everything we had agreed to get leniency [for Kirill Sukhanov, Arian Romanovsky and Tamerlan Bigayev],' she wrote in a statement. 'Why are you ruining people's lives? 'Why the disproportionality? Just as revenge?' Her despair over the Ukraine war sparked a popular YouTube show in which she deals with stories that Russia's state media usually turn a blind eye to. Her interests include the arrests of antiwar activists, violence committed by soldiers returning from the front and human rights abuses in the southern region of Chechnya. Russian equivalent of Paris Hilton in the Noughties.
Bloomberg
21 hours ago
- Business
- Bloomberg
Putin Says Russia to Seek Defense Cuts Though It Depends on War
President Vladimir Putin said Russia plans to cut defense spending, acknowledging growing strains on the budget even as he insisted that reductions would depend on winning his war in Ukraine. Russia is spending 6.3% of gross domestic product on defense this year and 'that's a lot,' Putin told reporters in Minsk, Belarus, on Friday. 'It's one of the problems, including for the budget, that we have to resolve,' and Russia paid a price in inflation from the increased expenditure, he said.
