Ukraine Russia war latest: Zelensky says Kyiv is holding onto Kursk positions as Russia launches drone barrage

Social media ads promise young African women a free plane ticket, money and a faraway adventure in Europe. Just complete a computer game and a 100-word Russian vocabulary test.

But instead of a work-study program in fields like hospitality and catering, some of them learned only after arriving on the steppes of Russia’s Tatarstan region that they would be toiling in a factory to make weapons of war, assembling thousands of Iranian-designed attack drones to be launched into Ukraine.

In interviews with The Associated Press, some of the women complained of long hours under constant surveillance, of broken promises about wages and areas of study, and of working with caustic chemicals that left their skin pockmarked and itching.

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A 27-year-old man said he left the concert as the last song was playing after he was told about the recruitment officers.

He said he saw soldiers and police talking to people but “didn’t see anything super aggressive.”

He said men felt in danger of being drafted whenever they ventured outside.

“That inner state of always being in danger, it’s back again,” he told The Associated Press, only giving his first name for fear of retribution.

He said his university draft waiver was taken away after Ukraine passed laws in April that both lowered draft-eligible age for men from 27 to 25 and did away with some draft exemptions.

Russia launched 68 drones and four missiles targeting Ukrainian territory overnight, Ukraine’s air force said on Sunday.

Two Iskander-M ballistic missiles struck Poltava and Odesa regions and two Kh-59 guided air missiles targeted the Chernihiv and Sumy regions, the air forces said on the Telegram messaging app.

Ukraine’s air defence units destroyed 31 of the drones, while 36 were unaccounted for, most likely intercepted by Ukraine’s electronic warfare, the air force said. The remaining drone was still in the air, it said.

Ukrainian military recruitment officers raided restaurants, bars and a concert hall in Kyiv, checking military registration documents and detaining men who were not in compliance, The Associated Press reported quoting media and witnesses.

Officers descended on Kyiv’s Palace of Sports venue after a concert on Friday night by Ukrainian rock band Okean Elzy.

Video footage aired by local media outlets appears to show officers stationed outside the doors of the concert hall intercepting men as they exit. In the footage, officers appear to be forcibly detaining some men.

Checks were also conducted at Goodwine, an upscale shopping centre, and Avalon, a popular restaurant.

Local reports said raids were also conducted in clubs and restaurants across other Ukrainian cities, including Kharkiv and Dnipro in eastern and central Ukraine.

It is unusual for such raids to take place in the capital, the AP said, and reflects Ukraine’s dire need for fresh recruits.

Ukraine has intensified its mobilisation drive this year. A new law came into effect this spring stipulating that those eligible for military service must input their information into an online system or face penalties.

All Ukrainian men aged 25-60 are eligible for conscription, and men aged 18-60 are not allowed to leave the country.

Prosecutors in Donetsk region on Saturday said two people were killed in Russian strikes on villages near Kurakhove.

The General Staff of Ukraine’s military, in a late evening report, reported 47 clashes in the area around Kurakhove and 27 more in the Pokrovsk sector to the northwest.

Further to the northeast, in Toretsk, which both Ukrainian and Russian forces say has been partly occupied by Russian forces, the General Staff said Russian forces had launched 14 assaults, assisted by air strikes.

Russia’s air defence units shot down 13 Ukrainian drones overnight across three regions near the border with Ukraine, the defence ministry said in a statement on Sunday.

Six drones were downed over both the Belgorod and Kursk regions, while one drone was intercepted over the Bryansk region, according to the ministry’s statement on Telegram.

Friends, family and colleagues of Viktoriia Roshchyna, a Ukrainian journalist who died in Russian prison, gathered for a vigil this weekend in a square in Kyiv.

“Read and remember Vika,” they asked, Ukrainska Pavda reported.

Roshchyna, who was covering the war as a freelance journalist for Ukrainska Pravda, disappeared in August 2023.

In May this year, Russia confirmed that she was detained. This week, her father was informed by the Russian defence ministry in a letter that she died in September, aged 27.

The document said her body would be returned in one of the swaps organised by Russia and Ukraine for soldiers killed on the battlefield.

Roshchyna was one of the very few people who was covering the war from a Russian-occupied territory. She provided crucial stories that weren’t otherwise available, and despite the risk to her life she continued to report without a pseudonym.

She was earlier detained for 10 days, but she did not stop reporting, her colleagues said.

“Her parents used to call and tell us to stop deploying her, but we never did deploy her!” one of her former bosses told BBC News.

“All her editors tried to stop her. But it was impossible.”

The sanctioned leaders held an inaugural meeting on the sidelines of a regional summit in Ashgabat, the capital of the Central Asian country Turkmenistan, to discuss – among other topics – the ongoing situation in the Middle East.

“We are actively working together in the international arena and our assessments of events taking place in the world are often very close,” Putin said during the meeting, according to Russian state media outlet Tass.

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President Volodymyr Zelensky said on Saturday that Russian forces had tried to oust Ukrainian troops from positions in Russia’s Kursk border region, but that Kyiv’s forces were holding their lines.

“Regarding the Kursk operation, Russia tried to push back our positions, but we are holding the designated lines,” Mr Zelensky said in his nightly video address.

Russia’s defence ministry said on Friday that its forces had recaptured two villages in the border Kursk region, where Ukrainian troops launched a mass incursion in August.

Mr Zelensky has acknowledged that the Ukrainian advance into Kursk was intended to draw Russian troops away from frontline positions in eastern Ukraine, where Russian forces have been making steady gains in recent months.

In his address, Mr Zelensky said that in Donetsk and Zaporizhzhia regions, partly held by Russian forces, “there are very difficult conditions, with harsh enemy actions. But the resilience of our units is crucial. Everything depends on our resilience.”

When MPs and peers jostled for a standing-room-only place in parliament to see and hear him?

When the one-time TV actor turned democratically elected president turned war leader drew rapt attention with his gritty determination and allusions to Churchill?

Well, those heady days of Britain reliving its finest hour by association are over.

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