The attacks, which have intensified through the summer, are creating cascading effects from empty gas stations and rationing across Russian regions to soaring wholesale prices and mounting pressure on the economy.

Russia's spring and summer offensives this year have failed to meet their goals, Ukraine's military chief Oleksandr Syrskyi said, adding that Russia was firing twice as much artillery as Ukraine on the battlefield.

Kremlin spokesman shoots back at Trump's suggestion that Russia is "a paper tiger," declaring: "There are no paper bears. And Russia is a real bear."

The Kremlin on Wednesday rejected the central arguments for U.S. President Donald Trump's rhetorical U-turn on the war in Ukraine, with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy warning the UN General Assembly that Russia's invasion has led to "the most destructive arms race in history.

Russia is using its battlefield experience to give Chinese airborne units the training and technical knowhow to carry out lightning-fast operations.

German Chancellor Friedrich Merz has called on the European Union to use $160billion of frozen Russian assets for Ukraine’s benefit – particularly the continued supply of weapons – in a major policy U-turn by Berlin.

Russia has been encroaching on its NATO neighbors’ airspace for decades, then either denying it happened or brushing it off as unintentional. But since its 2022 invasion of Ukraine, such incursions have carried a bigger threat.

The US and Canada scrambled fighter jets to identify and intercept four Russian military planes off Alaska, amid growing concern over Moscow’s incursions into Nato airspace. The North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) said it had detected and tracked two Russian Tu-95s and two Su-35s operating in the Alaskan Air Defence Identification Zone.