Ukraine war: Putin’s home fortified amid growing threat from Kyiv’s drones

After almost 30 months of war with Russia, Ukraine’s difficulties on the battlefield are mounting even as its vital support from the United States is increasingly at the mercy of changing political winds.

A six-month delay in military assistance from the U.S., the biggest single contributor to Ukraine, opened the door for the Kremlin’s forces to push on the front line. Ukrainian troops are now fighting to check the slow but gradual gains by Russia’s bigger and better-equipped army.

“The next two or three months are going to be probably the hardest this year for Ukraine,” military analyst Michael Kofman of the Carnegie Endowment said in a recent podcast.

The Conservative ex-premier was in Washington this week to attend the Republican National Conference in Milwaukee, where Mr Trump was named the party’s official candidate in the upcoming US presidential elections.

After a photograph circulated showing him giving a speech to a near-empty room at the conference on Tuesday, Mr Johnson later shared an image of himself meeting with Mr Trump, just days after the ex-president survived an assassination attempt at a rally in Pennsylvania.

The 42-year-old face of the Russian opposition to Vladimir Putin, who grew up in London and earned a history degree from Cambridge University, is currently being held in a medical facility connected to his Siberian penal colony, having been moved there on 4 July. Evgenia Kara-Murza spent days not knowing where or how he was.

Efforts are being made to hold a second peace summit on Ukraine this year, Hungary Foreign Minister Peter Szijjarto told Russia‘s RIA state news agency in remarks published on Wednesday.

“Efforts are being made to hold the next round of the peace conference this year, which we would certainly welcome and appreciate,” Szijjarto told the agency.

“I believe that if we want to hope for any peace conference in the future to be successful, we need to make sure that both sides are represented.”

Russia and Ukraine are set to exchange 90 prisoners of war on Wednesday in a deal facilitated by the United Arab Emirates, a person familiar with the matter said.

Last week, Ukrainian parliament’s Commissioner for Human Rights Dmytro Lubinets had said the government, with the help of the UAE, was planning “a big” prisoner exchange with Russia soon.

Russia and Ukraine have conducted a few prisoner swaps in the 27-month-old war that started after Russia invaded its smaller neighbour.

In their last such exchange in June, which was also facilitated by the UAE, Russia and Ukraine each handed back 90 prisoners.

Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich will appear in court on Thursday for the second hearing in his trial on espionage charges that he, his employer and the U.S. government vehemently deny, court records showed.

The trial is taking place behind closed doors in Yekaterinburg, a city in the Ural Mountains where the 32-year-old journalist was detained while on a reporting trip.

At the first hearing last month the court had adjourned until mid-August. But Gershkovich’s lawyers petitioned the court to hold the second hearing earlier, Russian state news agency RIA Novosti and independent news site Mediazona reported Tuesday, citing court officials.

Efforts are being made to hold a second peace summit on Ukraine this year, Hungary foreign minister Peter Szijjarto told Russia’s RIA state news agency in remarks published this morning.

“Efforts are being made to hold the next round of the peace conference this year, which we would certainly welcome and appreciate,” Szijjarto said.

“I believe that if we want to hope for any peace conference in the future to be successful, we need to make sure that both sides are represented.”

This comes just days after Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán made a surprise visit to Ukraine, his first since the Russian invasion began in February 2022. He followed it up with similarly unannounced visits to Russia and China.

Successful Ukrainian strikes deep inside enemy territory have forced Russia to beef up defences around Vladimir Putin’s home outside St Petersburg.

Satellite imagery collected on 6 May shows Russian forces have concentrated at least seven Pantsir-1 medium-range air defence systems around Russian president Vladimir Putin’s residence in Valdai, Leningrad oblast, according to the US-based think tank The Institute for the Study of War.

The images were first shared by the Russian service of Radio Liberty showing the bulky air defence system in a compound on the leader’s residence amid lush forest.

The drone strikes, which have successfully hit Russian air bases, have forced the Russian military command to prioritise limited air defence assets to cover what it deems high-value targets, the ISW said. The move could be futile as Ukrainian drones can still bypass the air defence coverage to strike from uncovered directions, experts told ISW.

“Such ‘focal’ air defence coverage (static coverage of a singular target) is meaningless at scale because it allows Ukrainian drones to bypass Russian air defence coverage and strike from uncovered directions,” said Ruslan Pukhov, the head of the Moscow-based Center for Analysis of Strategies and Technologies and a member of a Russian Ministry of Defence (MoD) civilian advisory board.

It added that the Russian military apparently lacks the required conventional air defence systems to protect all critical facilities within western Russia and has even struggled to cover important potential targets in reportedly well-defended areas within Russia.

Top EU officials will boycott informal meetings hosted by Hungary while the country has the EU’s rotating presidency, after Hungary’s pro-Russian Prime Minister Viktor Orban held a series of rogue meetings with foreign leaders about Ukraine that angered European partners.

The highly unusual decision to have the European Commission president and other top officials of the body boycott the meetings was made ‘’in light of recent developments marking the start of the Hungarian (EU) presidency,” commission spokesperson Eric Mamer posted Monday on X.

China and Russia have begun live-fire naval exercises in the South China Sea, and have deployed at least three vessels each for the three-day exercises despite mounting criticism of Beijing from Nato.

Last week, China was slammed by Nato for being “decisive enabler” of Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.

The exercises will see the two countries engage in live-fire training, reconnaissance and early warning drills, search and rescue, and air defence, according to a state-run Chinese publication yesterday evening, which quoted the Chinese military’s South Sea Fleet.

Military official Wang Guangzheng told Chinese state broadcaster CCTV that “the China-Russia joint patrol has promoted the deepening and practical cooperation between the two in multiple directions and fields”.

“And [it has] effectively enhanced the ability of the two sides to jointly respond to maritime security threats.”

The participating vessels set off from a naval port in Zhanjiang in southern China’s Guangdong province on Monday, the report added, citing a People’s Liberation Army (PLA) Navy statement.

The report did not specify where in the contested waterway the drills would take place. The drills follow the completion of a separate joint naval patrol in the north Pacific, other state media said.

China claims control over almost the entire South China Sea, including the disputed Second Thomas Shoal, where the Philippines maintains a rusty warship that it deliberately grounded in 1999 to reinforce its maritime claims and which has been central to a recent standoff between the two countries.