Ukraine-Russia war latest: Germany says Europe and Russia ‘no longer at peace’ while Putin plans huge conscription

Russia is pushing for its biggest conscription drive since 2016.

President Vladimir Putin has signed a decree for plans to recruit 135,000 soldiers from Wednesday until the end of the year.

It is the single largest draft for mandatory service since 2016, when 152,000 soldiers were enlisted.

Citizens of Russia aged between 18 to 30 who are not in the reserve will be drafted.

The European Union has begun laying the groundwork for Ukraine and Moldova to move closer to membership, despite Hungary’s ongoing efforts to block progress, according to officials familiar with the discussions.

Kyiv formally applied to join the bloc in 2022, shortly after Russia launched its full-scale invasion, with neighbouring Moldova following soon after.

Both countries officially opened accession talks last year, but further steps have since stalled because the EU requires unanimous backing from all 27 members to open individual “chapters” of negotiations covering areas such as energy, competition policy and judicial reform.

Brussels is now seeking a way around Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán’s veto. According to officials, the European Commission has suggested changing its procedures to allow technical work on several “clusters” of rules to begin, even without a formal agreement to open negotiations.

The matter is expected to be discussed by EU leaders at a meeting in Copenhagen on Wednesday, ahead of a broader summit on Thursday that will also include Ukraine and Moldova.

Taras Kachka, Ukraine’s deputy prime minister for European integration, said Kyiv would continue trying to convince Budapest to lift its objections, noting that the final decision on accession will always rest with all member states.

“But meanwhile we have and we really appreciate that we have, an offer from EU institutions and other member states to go with technical work on clusters,” Kachka told the Financial Times.

The war in Ukraine is driving a wave of organised crime gang operations in rural parts of Britain, with stolen farm machinery being sent to eastern Europe for “lucrative rewards”, a police officer has warned.

Following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine three years ago, police say a black market has opened up for equipment in the region, which has seen production plummet and sanctions imposed on Moscow.

Two brothers aged four and six and their parents were killed in an overnight Russian drone attack on a village in the northern Sumy region, the regional governor Oleh Hryhorov said on Tuesday.

“Last night, the enemy purposefully hit a residential building with an attack drone in the village of Chernechchyna,” Hryhorov wrote on the Telegram messaging app.

He added the family’s bodies were pulled from under the rubble. The report could not be independently verified.

Russian forces are engaged in a long, grinding war along the front line through eastern and southern Ukraine, but have also tried to gain a foothold in areas like Sumy, which borders Russia’s Kursk region.

Russia denies targeting civilians in its almost daily drone and missile attacks on Ukraine. Thousands of civilians have been killed and homes, apartment blocks and commercial property damaged and destroyed.

Maksym Butkevych, a Ukrainian journalist and human rights activist who was released last year after being captured by Russian forces, was handed the Václav Havel Human Rights Prize by the Council of Europe on Monday.

Butkevych, who confounded the independent Hromadske radio station and Zmina human rights centre in Kyiv, was detained by Russia in June 2022 and convicted for war crimes in March 2023.

Sentenced to a 13-year prison term on charges of wounding two civilians while serving as a soldier in the Ukrainian army, he was released last year in October during prison exchange.

Tensions are rising over Europe’s largest nuclear facility after a key power line failed in the war-torn southeast of Ukraine, leaving the Zaporizhzhia plant reliant on emergency diesel generators.

The outage, which began last Wednesday, has stretched longer than previous cuts during the conflict, heightening concerns about the plant’s cooling systems that prevent fuel from overheating inside its inactive reactors.

Moscow and Kyiv have traded accusations over the disruption. Russian officials claim Ukrainian shelling destroyed the high-voltage line, making repair efforts too dangerous.

Ukraine, however, has accused Moscow of engineering the crisis as a pretext to link the facility to Russia’s electricity grid and bring it back online despite the risks of operating in a combat zone.

Although experts say the immediate threat of a meltdown or explosion is low, every loss of external power weakens the plant’s already fragile safeguards.

“This situation is critical,” said Bruno Chareyron, scientific adviser to the French nonprofit Commission for Independent Research and Information on Radioactivity. Referring to the reliance on diesel power, he added: “The problem is, with this war, people get used to it. It’s very dangerous that people are used to a situation that is absolutely not normal” for the functioning of a nuclear facility.

The plant has long been a flashpoint. Russian forces stormed it in March 2022, hitting buildings and equipment during their assault.

Since September that year, all six reactors have remained shut down, but the facility continues to sit on the frontline – with every disruption raising new fears about its safety.

Britain and Russia may already be at war, said a former head of MI5. But it is a “different sort of war”, said Baroness Manningham-Buller while appearing on the Lord Speaker’s Corner podcast.

“Fiona Hill may be right in saying we’re already at war with Russia,” said the former chief of Security Services, who served as the head between 2002 and 2007.

“It’s a different sort of war, but the hostility, the cyberattacks, the physical attacks, intelligence work is extensive.”

Speaking of her meeting with Putin in 2005, she said: “We all hoped that at the end of the Soviet Union we would have a potential partner. That was one of the reasons why Putin was with us for the G8 summit in 2005.

“I met him when he came back to London. But actually we were wrong because Russia is extremely hostile to the West. I didn’t anticipate that within a year he’d be ordering the murder on London streets of Alexander Litvinenko.”

Hungary said on Monday it was blocking access to 12 Ukrainian news sites after a similar move by Kyiv, worsening relations between the two neighbours which have been fraught during Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Earlier this month, Ukraine blocked various websites deemed to contain pro-Russian views at the request of the security services. They included eight Hungarian-language portals, among them a popular pro-government news site, origo.hu.

“A sovereign country must give a proportional response to an entirely unjustified attack,” Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orban’s chief of staff, Gergely Gulyas, said in a Facebook post on Monday, announcing the measure.

Most of the websites targeted by Hungary are widely read in Ukraine.

One, European Pravda, closely tracks Ukraine’s EU accession aspiration and Hungary’s efforts to block that.

Gulyas said Ukraine banned the Hungarian portals because they wrote critically about sanctions against Russia and military support for Ukraine and criticised the European Union and Nato alliance as being fragmented and ineffective.

“If the fragmentation of the European Union provides grounds for state censorship in Ukraine, then it is time for Ukraine to renounce its intention to join,” he wrote.

Russian president has called for the largest conscription operation in the military service since 2016, as the country announces vacancies for 135,000 men in the army.

The mobilisation comes amid mounting Russian losses in the war and pressure to maintain the 1,000km long frontline.

According to Western estimates over a million troops from Vladimir Putin’s army have died in the war. Putin has increased annual conscription by an average of five per cent since the start of war in 2022.

Russian president Vladimir Putin said on Monday that Russian forces are prevailing in what he said was a “righteous battle” in Ukraine.

“Our fighters and commanders go on the attack, and the entire country, all of Russia, is waging this righteous battle and working hard,” Putin said in a video published on the Kremlin’s website.

“Together we are defending our love for the Motherland and the unity of our historical destiny, we are fighting and we are prevailing.”

Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine on 24 February 2022, calling it a “special military operation” to demilitarise and de-nazify its neighbour.

Kyiv and its allies say the invasion is an unprovoked imperialistic attempt to grab land.