Ukraine-Russia war live: Killed security chief at Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant was ‘collaborator’

Romania recovered fragments from a Russian drone from a canal in the Danube Delta near the Ukrainian border, the defence ministry has said.

Romania shares a 650 km (400 mile) border with Ukraine and has had Russian drone fragments stray into its territory repeatedly over the past year.

Romanian territory lies a few hundred metres from Ukrainian Danube River ports, frequent Russian targets.

Russia has knocked out around 80 per cent of critical infrastructure in the town of Pokrovsk, a key logistics hub in Ukraine‘s east, as Moscow’s troops inched forward, a local official said.

Serhiy Dobriak, Pokrovsk’s military administration head, said Russian forces were at about 4 miles from the town, which is at an intersection of roads and a railway that makes it an important logistics point for the military and for civilians in the eastern Donetsk region.

Russia forces have focused some of their heaviest assaults in recent weeks on Pokrovsk, which could allow it to consolidate and advance the front line in the region.

“The enemy is leaving us without power, without water, without gas. Prepares us for the winter, so to say,” Dobriak said on national television.

Some 13,050 residents remain in the town and Ukrainian officials are pressing on with an evacuation plan that has been going on for some weeks. Just a month and a half ago, the town hosted more than 48,000 people, he said.

Russia continued to pummel the town on Thursday, launching a total of nine glide bombs and injuring four people in two attacks which damaged infrastructure, Dobriak said.

He said the daily attacks targeted energy facilities and other vital infrastructure. Almost half of Pokrovsk, 10 nearby villages and one smaller town were without power, he said, adding the energy infrastructure was “almost impossible to repair”.

There is no prospect for negotiation “anytime soon” over the war in Ukraine, western officials have said.

They added that Ukraine was unlikely to reverse recent gains by Russia with “relative stability on the front line” expected.

Russia captured the tactically significant town of Vuhledar on Wednesday, as officials said Moscow would now “seek to exploit opportunities in villages and towns in its vicinity in the coming weeks”.

However, they added that Russia would not be able to “fundamentally capitalise on these gains”.

Western officials said: “We’re not going to suddenly see a breakthrough and a rapid advance of Russia westwards.

“It will just continue to be this slow grind.”

Poland will start building the first elements of enhanced defence lines on its borders with Russia and Belarus by the end of 2024, a deputy defence minister has said.

Spurred by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Warsaw laid out plans in May to spend 10 billion zlotys (£1.97 billion) to beef up its northern and eastern borders with fortifications, surveillance, reconnaissance and anti-drone systems by the end of 2028 to deter adversaries or help repel a potential attack.

“In the next three weeks, we will be able to carry out the first tests of the East Shield elements on Polish military training grounds, and this year we will start building the first elements … on the northern and eastern borders,” Cezary Tomczyk told a press conference.

He said the project would be developed in cooperation with Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia as well as with British and American forces.

The war in Ukraine has spurred Poland to boost defence spending to 4.2% of gross domestic product (GDP) in 2024 and a planned 4.7% in 2025.

Defence Minister Wladyslaw Kosiniak-Kamysz was asked at the same event about defence spending beyond 2025, and said the upward trend should be maintained.