Ukraine said it was sending reinforcements to the east to counter heavy Russian attacks as Moscow hailed its deepening relations with North Korea and Britain’s foreign intelligence chief accused Kremlin operatives of conducting a “staggeringly reckless” sabotage campaign against Kyiv’s western allies.
Oleksandr Syrskyi, Ukraine’s top commander, said on Friday that after visiting troops in the Pokrovsk and Kurakhove areas of Donetsk region “all necessary decisions have been made to strengthen the units with reserves, additional ammunition, weapons and military equipment”.
“We continue to hold back the enemy and inflict heavy losses in terms of manpower and equipment,” he added, as Russia claimed to have taken two more villages in southern Donetsk, from where it is trying to push north to Kurakhove and Pokrovsk, which have been important to Kyiv’s defence of the area for a decade.
Moscow’s invasion force has accelerated its grinding advance in the Donetsk region in recent weeks, and is also attacking in parts of Kharkiv and Zaporizhzhia regions and pushing back Ukrainian units that seized part of Russia’s Kursk province this summer.
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Ukraine and western intelligence agencies say North Korean soldiers are now helping Russia in the Kursk region as part of a deployment of more than 10,000 troops by Pyongyang. Kyiv’s military intelligence agency said on Friday that North Korea had also provided Moscow with about 100 short-range ballistic missiles and more than 100 self-propelled artillery systems in the last two months.
“Today friendly ties between Russia and North Korea are expanding across all areas, including military collaboration. We are committed to implementing all agreements reached at the highest level,” Russian defence minister Andrei Belousov said after arriving in Pyongyang for talks. “We look forward to close and fruitful co-operation with our Korean comrades.”
Kyiv and its allies say the Kremlin’s introduction of North Korean troops into the war marked a new round of escalation in Europe’s biggest conflict since 1945, and in response the United States and Britain gave Ukraine permission to use Atacms ballistic missiles and Storm Shadow cruise missiles against targets inside Russia.
Russian reacted by firing a powerful experimental missile called “Oreshnik” at the eastern Ukrainian city of Dnipro and lowering its threshold for use of a nuclear weapon against an enemy. However, western governments believe a nuclear strike by Russia is far less likely than a heightened campaign of sabotage and cyber attacks that would give the Kremlin a degree of deniability.
“We have recently uncovered a staggeringly reckless campaign of Russian sabotage in Europe, even as [President Vladimir] Putin and his acolytes resort to nuclear sabre-rattling to sow fear about the consequences of aiding Ukraine,” said Richard Moore, head of Britain’s MI6, without giving details of what operations he had in mind.
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