Russia-Ukraine war: White House presses Ukraine to draft 18-year-old men to help fill manpower needs – as it happened

It is approaching 8pm in Kyiv and 9pm in Moscow. This liveblog will be closing soon but you can keep up to date on the Guardian’s latest coverage of Russia and Ukraine here.

Here are the latest developments:

• President Joe Biden’s administration is urging Ukraine to quickly increase the size of its military by drafting more troops and revamping its mobilisation laws to allow for the conscription of troops as young as 18. A senior Biden administration official, who spoke to the Associated Press (AP) on the condition of anonymity to discuss the private consultations, said on Wednesday that the outgoing Democratic administration wants Ukraine to lower the mobilisation age to 18 from the current age of 25 to help expand the pool of fighting age men available to help Ukraine in its nearly three-year-old war with Russia.

• Ukrainian defence minister, Rustem Umerov, said he had discussed joint steps to strengthen security and stability with South Korean president, Yoon Suk Yeol, while on a visit to Seoul on Wednesday. “We believe that our arguments about the need to increase cooperation between Ukraine and the Republic of Korea will lead to a tangible strengthening of security for our peoples and regions,” Umerov wrote in a statement on the Telegram messaging app.

• Yoon’s office said in a statement that the president hopes that Seoul and Kyiv will work out effective ways to cope with the security threat posed by the North Korean-Russian military cooperation including the North’s troop dispatch.

• The Ukrainian delegation later met separately with Yoon’s national security adviser, Shin Wonsik, and defence minister, Kim Yong Hyun. During the meetings, Umerov briefed the South Korean officials on the status of the Russia-Ukraine war and expressed hope that Kyiv and Seoul will strengthen cooperation, the statement said. It said the two sides agreed to continue to share information on the North Korean troops in Russia and North Korean-Russian weapons and technology transfers while closely coordinating with the US. The South Korean statement did not say whether the two sides discussed Seoul’s possible weapons supply to Ukraine.

• Nordic and Baltic states and Poland said on Wednesday that they would in the coming months step up support for Ukraine, including to the country’s defence industry, and invest in making more ammunition available. “We are committed to strengthening our deterrence, and defence, including resilience, against conventional as well as hybrid attacks, and to expanding sanctions against Russia as well as against those who enable Russia’s aggression,” the leaders of Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Latvia, Norway, Poland and Sweden said in a statement.

• Russia warned the US on Wednesday to halt what it called a “spiral of escalation” over Ukraine, but said it would keep informing Washington about test missile launches in order to avoid “dangerous mistakes”. The comments from the Russian deputy foreign minister, Sergei Ryabkov, sent a signal that Moscow, which last week approved a new policy that lowered its threshold for the use of nuclear weapons, wants to keep communication channels open at a time of acute tensions with the US.

• Ryabkov, also said on Wednesday that the use of the new Oreshnik intermediate-range ballistic missile against Ukraine was needed to make Moscow’s voice heard, Reuters reported citing the state RIA news agency.

• Russia’s rouble has plunged to its lowest rate against the dollar since the early weeks of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in the wake of new western sanctions and growing geopolitical tensions.

• Russia said on Wednesday that it would expel one correspondent and one cameraman from Germany’s ARD in a symmetrical response to German moves against journalists from Russia’s Channel One that Berlin denied undertaking. WDR, a regional arm of ARD responsible for the broadcasting association’s news output from Russia, criticised Russia’s decision to strip the two German journalists of their permits to work in the country.

• Pushing back against Russia’s version of events, a German foreign ministry spokesperson denied that the Channel One office in Berlin was being shuttered, and said the Russian journalists’ departure was related to residence law matters. “Russian journalists can report freely and unhindered in Germany. A whole series of Russian journalists are also accredited with the Federal Press Office,” the spokesperson told a regular government news conference.

• Russian president Vladimir Putin arrived in Kazakhstan on Wednesday for a two-day trip aimed at shoring up ties with his Central Asian ally as tensions mount over the Ukraine war. Kazakhstan is a member of the Moscow-led CSTO security alliance but has expressed concern about the almost three-year conflict, which Kazakh president Kassym-Jomart Tokayev has refused to condone.

• Russia said on Wednesday that if the US stationed missiles in Japan, this would threaten Russian security and prompt Moscow to retaliate. Japan’s Kyodo news agency reported on Sunday that Japan and the US aim to compile a joint military plan for a possible Taiwan emergency that includes deploying missiles. Russian foreign ministry spokesperson, Maria Zakharova, accused Japan of escalating the situation around Taiwan to justify the expansion of military ties with Washington.

• Any plan for the west to give Ukraine nuclear weapons would be “insane”, the Russian foreign ministry has said and claimed that preventing such a scenario was one of the reasons why Moscow went into Ukraine. Zakharova said it was in the interests of responsible governments to ensure that such a scenario, which she called “suicidal”, did not unfold.

• The head of the EU executive, Ursula von der Leyen, has called for more defence spending in Europe over the next five years, as her top team was voted in by a wafer-thin majority of MEPs. The EU faces acute challenges, including the war in Ukraine, the return of Donald Trump and the climate crisis, all against a backdrop of deepening fears of economic decline as von der Leyen starts her second term.

• Poland said on Wednesday that it had detained a German citizen and charged the suspect with brokering and exporting dual-use goods to Russia. The German citizen traded in specialist machines used in the technological industry, which – through his company – were illegally sent to Russian military plants involved in the production of weapons,” the Internal Security Agency (ISA) said in a statement. “The suspect pleaded guilty and filed a motion for voluntary submission to punishment.”

Russia’s rouble has plunged to its lowest rate against the dollar since the early weeks of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in the wake of new western sanctions and growing geopolitical tensions.

The rouble on Wednesday hit 110 against the dollar for the first time since 16 March 2022. Before launching its war on Ukraine in February 2022, the Russian currency traded at around 75-80 against the US dollar.

The latest drop came just days after the US introduced sanctions against Gazprombank, Russia’s third-largest bank, which played a key role in processing payments for the remaining Russian natural gas exports to Europe.

Earlier rounds of sanctions had spared Russian gas because Europe’s economy was so dependent on it, but it is now far less reliant on Russian supplies. The Gazprombank sanctions raise the prospect of a further decrease in gas revenues and foreign currency for Moscow.

The rouble’s weakening threatens to erode Russians’ purchasing power by increasing the cost of imported goods and could further increase inflation.

The country is already contending with runaway inflation, which could climb to 8.5% this year – twice the Central Bank’s target.

The borscht index, an online cost of living tracker monitoring the prices of four ingredients needed to make the traditional soup, reports a 20% rise compared with 2023.

The rising inflation prompted the Central Bank last month to raise interest rates to 21% – their highest level in more than 20 years – and a further hike is expected in December.

The weak rouble will, however, also help the Kremlin prop up its budget – much of which comes from energy exports – in order to pay for its war in Ukraine and maintain public spending.

President Joe Biden’s administration is urging Ukraine to quickly increase the size of its military by drafting more troops and revamping its mobilisation laws to allow for the conscription of troops as young as 18, reports the Associated Press (AP).

A senior Biden administration official, who spoke to the AP on the condition of anonymity to discuss the private consultations, said on Wednesday that the outgoing Democratic administration wants Ukraine to lower the mobilisation age to 18 from the current age of 25 to help expand the pool of fighting age men available to help Ukraine in its nearly three-year-old war with Russia.

The White House has pushed more than $56bn in security assistance to Ukraine since the start of Russia’s February 2022 invasion and expects to send billions more to Kyiv before Biden leaves office in less than months.

But with time running out, the Biden White House is also sharpening its viewpoint that Ukraine has the weaponry it needs and now must dramatically increase its manpower if it is going to stay in the fight with Russia.

According to the AP, the official said the Ukrainians believe they need about 160,000 additional troops, but the US administration believes they probably will need more.

Nordic and Baltic states and Poland said on Wednesday that they would in the coming months step up support for Ukraine, including to the country’s defence industry, and invest in making more ammunition available.

“We are committed to strengthening our deterrence, and defence, including resilience, against conventional as well as hybrid attacks, and to expanding sanctions against Russia as well as against those who enable Russia’s aggression,” the leaders of Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Latvia, Norway, Poland and Sweden said in a statement, according to Reuters.

The leaders were meeting at the Swedish government’s country retreat in Harpsund, south-west of Stockholm, for talks covering transatlantic relations, regional security cooperation and a common policy on the war in Ukraine.

The election of Donald Trump to a second presidential term has raised questions about the US’ commitment to supporting Ukraine in its war against Russia and about Washington’s role in Nato.

Many analysts believe that Europe will have to spend more on its own defence and on bolstering Ukraine’s military effort after Trump is inaugurated in January. The Nordic and Baltic countries – several of which share a border with Russia – are among Ukraine‘s biggest backers.

Aid from the Nordics, Baltics and Poland totals about €24bn, according to the Kiel Institute’s Ukraine Support Tracker, second only to the US in absolute terms.

“Europe needs to take a greater responsibility for its own security,” Swedish prime minister, Ulf Kristersson, said in a separate statement, reports Reuters.

He said:

That is preconditioned on us increasing our cooperation and continuing to support Ukraine, which is fighting for both its own and our security, over the long term.”

European Commission president calls for more EU defence spending

Jennifer Rankin

The head of the EU executive, Ursula von der Leyen, has called for more defence spending in Europe over the next five years, as her top team was voted in by a wafer-thin majority of MEPs.

The European parliament’s endorsement of the new EU executive by the narrowest-ever margin clears the way for von der Leyen and her chosen 26 European commissioners to start a five-year term on Sunday.

The EU faces acute challenges, including the war in Ukraine, the return of Donald Trump and the climate crisis, all against a backdrop of deepening fears of economic decline as von der Leyen starts her second term.

She told MEPs in the run-up to the vote that there was “something wrong in [the] equation” where Russia was spending up to 9% of GDP on defence while the European average was 1.9%.

“War is raging at Europe’s borders and we must be ready for what lies ahead, working hand in hand with Nato,” she told MEPs. “Our defence spending must increase,” she added, calling for efforts to boost the European defence industry and common defence projects.

Von der Leyen said Europe faced difficult choices that required “massive investments in our security and our prosperity”.

Shaun Walker

For the past three years, the CIA has run an unusually bold outreach programme. It targeted Russians within the country’s government and security services, attempting to turn them into double agents.

Slickly produced recruitment videos portrayed cooperation with the US secret agency as the patriotic choice for officials disaffected with Vladimir Putin’s regime and the war in Ukraine. The videos ended with instructions on how to contact the CIA in a secure manner.

Come January, however, any Russians who answered those calls will be facing a very different geopolitical reality. Donald Trump will be back in the White House and, if he pursues the same policies as last time around, will look to make an ally of Putin’s Russia. His nomination for a key intelligence post is Tulsi Gabbard, who has raised concerns with her remarks on foreign policy in recent years, including speaking of “Russia’s legitimate security concerns” as part of the cause of the war in Ukraine.

The dramatic change in potential policy towards Russia and Ukraine, combined with Trump’s well-established dismissiveness of concerns over the security of classified information, may lead to sleepless nights among any double agents who remain inside Russia.

“We don’t know for sure whether recruitments have been made, and nor should we know, but it’s certainly been the strategy, and moments of crisis like this in the past have been a golden opportunity for recruitment drives for western services,” said Calder Walton, an intelligence historian at Harvard’s Kennedy School and the author of a recent book on the history of the intelligence battle between Moscow and Washington.

Further to our earlier report, Germany rejected Russia’s claims it had shut a Russian TV channel’s Berlin bureau as ‘false’ on Wednesday, and criticised moves to expel two German journalists from Moscow in retaliation.

“The Russian claims are false, the federal government has not closed the office of this broadcaster,” said foreign ministry spokesperson Christian Wagner.

Commenting on reports Moscow would expel two German journalists in retaliation for the alleged closure, he said that Germany would reject such a move “in the strongest possible terms”.

Russian state-controlled media outlets have faced restrictions in the west including broadcast bans since Moscow launched its Ukraine offensive, as western regulators accuse them of spreading disinformation.

Russian state broadcaster Channel One’s correspondent Ivan Blagoi said on air that he and cameraman Dmitry Volkov were notified on Tuesday that they “must leave German territory in the first half of December”.

Russia said on Wednesday it was expelling two correspondents from German public broadcaster ARD in retaliation.

In Berlin, Wagner said about the two Russian journalists that “I can only assume that this is related to questions of residence rights”, which were a matter for regional, not national, authorities.

“Russian journalists can report freely and unhindered in Germany,” he added, stressing that many Russian journalists are accredited in the country.

He said that the Russian broadcaster “has been subject to EU sanctions since December 2022” – but that while this banned it from broadcasting in Europe, it did not impose any reporting restrictions.