Ukraine-Russia war latest: Kyiv fires British Storm Shadow missiles in largest attack on key Russian targets

An Australian soldier is feared dead in Russia after a video showed him with hands bounds and struck by a Russian interrogator.

Oscar Jenkins, 32, was reportedly fighting in the Ukraine invasion against Russian forces. A foreign soldier who trained him said he is mourning the death of Mr Jenkins as he said Russia executed the Australian national to make an example of him, reported The Sydney Morning Herald.

It is not immediately clear if Mr Jenkins is still alive in Russian custody.

Opposition leader Peter Dutton said the Russian and Australian ambassadors should be sent home if the Russians killed Jenkins.

“If there is confirmation that Oscar Jenkins has been killed, the government should take the strongest possible action and that is the ambassador should be withdrawn and that the ambassador here in Australia should be sent packing,” Mr Dutton, who could become prime minister in elections due this May, told the reporters.

“We should send a very clear message to Russia and to other similarly minded regimes that Australians are sacrosanct, that they deserve to be protected by their government and if they’re harmed in this way and if they’re brutally executed, as seems to be the suggestion in this case, and we wait for confirmation, then there should be a strong reaction from the prime minister,” he added.

Only Russia and the US should be involved in any negotiations on a settlement for Ukraine, Nikolai Patrushev, a hawkish adviser to Russian president Vladimir Putin, said yesterday.

“I believe that negotiations on Ukraine should be conducted between Russia and the US without the participation of other Western countries. There is nothing to talk about with London and Brussels,” he told the Komsomolskaya Pravda newspaper.

His remarks come shortly after Russia said it was ready for peace talks with the US as Joe Biden ends his term in the White House.

However, Nato secretary general Mark Rutte has called on the alliance to solidify Ukraine’s position before any potential peace talks with Russia. “Peace will not last if Putin gets his way in Ukraine, because then he will press ahead… I am convinced that peace can only last if Ukraine comes to the table from a position of strength,” he warned.

Moscow is open for talks with the US president-elect Donald Trump, Russia’s foreign minister Sergei Lavrov said yesterday.

The top Russian diplomat praised the incoming president for pointing to Nato’s plan to embrace Ukraine as a root cause of the nearly 3-year-old conflict.

Any prospective peace talks should involve broader arrangements for security in Europe, Mr Lavrov said at his annual news conference, while adding that Moscow is open to discussing security guarantees for Kyiv.

He specifically praised Mr Trump’s comments earlier this month in which he said that Nato’s plans to open its doors to Ukraine had led to hostilities.

Mr Trump said Russia had it “written in stone” that Ukraine’s membership in Nato should never be allowed, but the Biden administration had sought to expand the military alliance to Russia’s doorstep. Mr Trump said, “I could understand their feelings about that.”

“Nato did exactly what it had promised not to do, and Trump said that,” Mr Lavrov said.

“It marked the first such candid acknowledgement not only from a US but any Western leader that Nato had lied when they signed numerous documents. They were used as a cover while Nato has expanded to our borders in violation of the agreements,” he claimed.

Ukrainian forces scoured the bodies of more than a dozen dead North Korean enemy soldiers after a battle in Russia’s snowy region of Kursk this week.

Among them, they found one still alive. But as they approached, he detonated a grenade, blowing himself up, according to a description by Ukraine’s Special Operations Forces on Monday. The forces said their soldiers escaped the blast uninjured.

“Self-detonation and suicides: that’s the reality about North Korea,” said Kim, a 32-year-old former North Korean soldier who defected to the South in 2022, requesting he only be identified by his surname due to fears of reprisals against his family left in the North.

It is among mounting evidence from the battlefield, intelligence reports and testimonies of defectors that some North Korean soldiers are resorting to extreme measures as they support Russia’s three-year war with Ukraine.

Russian forces in 2024 advanced in Ukraine at the fastest rate since 2022, the war’s first year, and control about a fifth of the country. But the gains have come at the cost of heavy, though undisclosed, losses in men and equipment.

In 2024, Russia was invaded for the first time since the Second World War as Ukraine grabbed a slice of its western Kursk region in a surprise counter-attack on 6 August.

Russia has yet to eject Ukrainian forces from Kursk despite bringing in more than 10,000 troops from its ally North Korea, according to Ukrainian, South Korean and US assessments. Russia has neither confirmed nor denied their presence.

“To sustain even the very slow advance in Ukraine, Russia has been forced to ignore the months-long occupation of part of its own territory by Ukrainian forces,” British security expert Ruth Deyermond said.

“Taking a ‘nothing to see here’ attitude to the loss of its own land is not what great powers do, particularly one so preoccupied with the idea of state sovereignty.”

Deyermond, in a long thread posted on X, suggested Putin’s efforts to portray Russia as a leading world power were also undermined by the toppling of its chief Middle East ally, former Syrian president Bashar al-Assad, and its increasing dependence on China.

Mr Putin, the longest-serving ruler of Russia since Josef Stalin, said on 19 December that under his leadership the country had moved back from “the edge of the abyss” and rebuffed threats to its sovereignty.

With hindsight, he said, he should not have waited until February 2022 before launching his “special military operation” in Ukraine, the term he still uses for the full-scale invasion of Russia’s neighbour.

Australia’s prime minister Anthony Albanese has vowed the “strongest possible action” against Russia over an Australian citizen who has been captured as a prisoner while fighting for Ukraine.

The Australian national, Oscar Jenkins, 32, has been seen in a video dressed in military uniform with his hands bound being questioned and struck by a Russian interrogator.

Mr Albanese said Australia’s department of foreign affairs and trade officials were seeking “urgent clarification” of Jenkins’ circumstances. “We call upon Russia to immediately confirm Oscar Jenkins’ status. We remain gravely concerned,” Mr Albanese told reporters.

“We will await the facts to come out. But if there has been any harm caused to Oscar Jenkins, that is absolutely reprehensible. And the Australian government will take the strongest action possible,” the PM added. He did not elaborate on what action Australia might take if Jenkins has died.

Mr Jenkins had no previous military experience before joining the Ukraine defence forces early last year. While other Australians have been killed in combat in Ukraine, none have died in Russian captivity.

Russia is ready to discuss security guarantees for Ukraine as part of negotiations aimed at clinching a wider settlement to end the fighting, Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said.

The Kremlin said on Monday that the issue of security guarantees for both Russia and Ukraine would be an integral part of any possible settlement between the warring sides.

“We are ready to discuss security guarantees for the country that is now called Ukraine,” Lavrov told a news conference.