Russia Ukraine war latest: Kyiv hits major oil refinery in huge drone attack as North Korea ‘prepares more troops’

Russian forces recently executed at least six unarmed Ukrainian prisoners of war (POWs) in Donetsk, a US-based think tank said citing Ukrainian sources.

“Ukrainian sources circulated footage on 23 January of Russian soldiers shooting unarmed Ukrainian POWs in an unspecified area of Ukraine,” the Institute for the Study of War said.

Ukrainian officials are investigating social media footage of Russian forces executing six captured and unarmed Ukrainian servicemembers in an unspecified area of Donetsk oblast, the country’s human rights commissioner Dmytro Lyubinets said.

He noted that the footage shows a seventh Ukrainian POW in this group but that it is unclear what happened to the seventh POW based on the footage.

“ISW has frequently reported that Russian forces are conducting frontline executions of Ukrainian POWs and continues to assess that Russian military commanders are either complicit in or enabling their subordinates to conduct these executions,” the think tank said.

There are several variants of Army Tactical Missile Systems, a long-range missile system that often carries varying amounts of cluster bomblets.

Ukrainian forces used the US-supplied long-range ATACMS missiles for the first time in October 2023, with President Volodymyr Zelenskiy saying the weapons had “proven themselves.”

Ukraine likely has what are known as M39A1 Block IA ATACMS that are guided in part by Global Positioning System and have a range of 40 to 190 miles. They can carry a payload of 300 bomblets. The M39 Block IA were used in Operation Iraqi Freedom, according to Army documents, and were added to the US arsenal in 1997.

Russian security official Sergei Shoigu warned in an interview published on Friday that the risk of an armed clash between nuclear powers was rising.

Shoigu, the secretary of President Vladimir Putin’s Security Council, told TASS news agency: “Against the backdrop of increasing conflict and aggravation of geopolitical rivalry in the world, the risks of a violent clash between major states, including with the participation of nuclear powers, are growing.”

The former defence minister said that NATO was increasing activities on its eastern flank, close to Russia and Belarus, and rehearsing offensive as well as defensive scenarios there.

NATO says it is Russia that is raising tensions, including by announcing in 2023 that it was deploying tactical nuclear weapons in its ally Belarus, which borders three NATO countries.

Shoigu said that Russia, which sent tens of thousands of troops into Ukraine in February 2022, and Belarus were taking preventive measures against Western attempts aimed at “destabilizing the situation… from within”.

He reiterated that Belarus was now under the protection of Russia’s nuclear arsenal, as a consequence of changes that Putin announced last year to Russia’s doctrine on the use of nuclear weapons.

“The Russian ‘nuclear umbrella’ now ensures the protection of our closest ally in the same framework scenarios in which Russia allows a nuclear response for its own defence,” he said.

“Namely, when repelling an attack using weapons of mass destruction or aggression using conventional weapons that creates a critical threat to sovereignty or territorial integrity.”

Russian President Vladimir Putin has made clear he wants to restart nuclear arms cuts talks as soon as possible, the Kremlin said in response to comments by US President Donald Trump.

Trump said on Thursday he wanted to work towards cutting nuclear arms, adding that he thought Russia and China might support reducing their own weapons capabilities.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said the ball was in Washington’s court.

Russian forces are closing in on the strategically important eastern Ukrainian city of Pokrovsk after capturing a string of villages to its south, and Ukraine has halted production at its only coking coal mine nearby due to the advance.

Pokrovsk is a road and rail hub in Ukraine’s eastern Donetsk region, which had a pre-war population of some 60,000 people. While most people have fled, Ukraine estimated last month that up to 11,000 still remain in the city.

It lies on a key road used by the Ukrainian military to supply other embattled eastern outposts including the towns of Chasiv Yar and Kostiantynivka in the Donetsk region.

Ukraine’s only mine that produces coking coal – used in its once vast steel industry and vital for the country’s pre-war economy – is just a 20-minute drive to the west of Pokrovsk, and open source data shows Russian forces are less than 2 km (1.24 miles) from one of the mine shafts.

Moscow says it has annexed Ukraine’s eastern Donetsk region and sees taking control of Pokrovsk as an important stepping stone to incorporating the entire region into Russia. Kyiv and the West reject Russia’s territorial claims as illegal and accuse Moscow of prosecuting a war of colonial conquest.

Control of the city, which the Russian media call “the gateway to Donetsk”, would allow Moscow to severely disrupt Ukrainian supply lines along the eastern front and boost its campaign to capture Chasiv Yar, which sits on higher ground offering potential control of a wider area.

Squeezing the Ukrainian military’s access to the road network in the vicinity would make it harder for Kyiv’s troops to hold pockets of territory either side of Pokrovsk, which could allow Russia to advance the front line.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov has said that he saw no objective signs that Ukraine or the West were ready for peace talks despite all their increasingly loud statements about the need for such talks.

“Despite the increasingly loud talk about the need for peace talks, there are objectively no practical actions indicating that Kyiv and the West are really ready for them,” Lavrov said, according to a transcript of questions and answers he had received from reporters posted on his ministry’s website.

“On the contrary, Western military supplies to the Ukrainian armed forces are continuing, ultimatums to Russia are being worked out, there is a (Ukrainian) legal ban on negotiations, and the issue of the legitimacy of the Ukrainian authorities is not being resolved,” he said.

French Foreign Minister Jean-Noel Barrot has said he believed Hungary would eventually support a renewal of European Union sanctions against Russia.

Speaking at an event with his Spanish counterpart, Barrot added that EU sanctions against Russia were for the security of Europe.

Spain’s foreign minister said he was hopeful that the EU would find consensus and unanimity on a renewal of the EU’s sanctions package against Russia.