Ukraine war briefing: Zelenskyy says Ukraine needs to achieve faster results on the battlefield

President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has said Ukraine needs to secure and deploy advanced missiles and to achieve faster results with them on the battlefield. He said a meeting with top commanders had been devoted to the development of domestic weapons supplies, involving drones, electronic warfare and, above all, deploying missiles that would reap rapid benefits in battlefield confrontations with Russian forces. “In all of Ukraine’s missiles achievements, there must be more combat accomplishments both at the front and on Russian territory,” he said. “Results are needed faster. And all relevant tasks are now being carried out.”

Ukrainian forces were maintaining sufficient pressure on Russian troops in Russia’s Kursk region, where Kyiv launched a mass incursion in August.
“Fighting is now going on in Kursk region for a third month and we are maintaining the necessary pressure on Russia in this sector,” Zelenskyy said in the address.

Joe Biden has called off a four-day trip to Germany this week that had been intended to culminate in a summit to discuss Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s “victory plan” for Ukraine. The White House said on Tuesday evening that the president would stay at home “to oversee preparations for and the response” to Hurricane Milton, which is expected to make landfall in Florida on Wednesday. It was not clear how Biden’s absence would affect the planned summit, the first time world leaders were due to gather at the Ramstein US airbase, normally the location of a regular meeting of defence ministers to discuss military aid for Kyiv.

Russian attacks on Ukraine’s second city of Kharkiv on Tuesday killed two people and wounded more than 30, regional authorities said. Kharkiv, which lies in northeastern Ukraine near the Russian border, has been hit by relentless attacks for months. The victims were a woman and a man in their 70s.

Russia’s telecoms watchdog on Tuesday announced that it was banning US social media platform Discord for violating the country’s laws, signalling the latest move by authorities to tighten control over the internet. Access to Discord was being “restricted due to the violation of requirements of Russian legislation” pertaining to “preventing the use of messaging for terrorist and extremist purposes”, telecoms watchdog Roskomnadzor said in a statement.

Donald Trump has had as many as seven private phone calls with Vladimir Putin since leaving office and also gave Putin Covid testing machines, acclaimed US journalist Bob Woodward has claimed in his new book, War. Trump has denied the reporting in an interview with ABC News’ Jonathan Karl.

The book also claimed that months into the war, the United States had intelligence pointing to “highly sensitive, credible conversations inside the Kremlin” that Putin was seriously considering using nuclear weapons to avoid major battlefield losses. The US intelligence pointed to a 50% chance that Putin would use tactical nukes if Ukrainian forces surrounded 30,000 Russian troops in the southern city of Kherson, the book says.