Ukraine war latest: Russians told to avoid West amid warnings of Putin’s new missile

Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orban proposed a Christmas ceasefire and a prisoner of war swap with Ukraine to Russian president Vladimir Putin in a phone call on Wednesday, Orban’s chief of staff told a briefing on Thursday.

“One (the ceasefire) was regarded as worthy of consideration … in the other issue, in the POW swap, (Putin) was supportive,” Gergely Gulyas said.

He said Hungary wanted a ceasefire to last forever, “but now this was about the Christmas days”.

Mr Gulyas did not elaborate on whether Ukraine had been consulted on this proposal.

Ukrainians have laid flowers at the site of a Russian missile strike earlier this week that killed 10 and wounded nearly two dozen more in the southern Zaporizhzhia region.

The country’s interior ministry said in an update this morning that emergency and rescue operations at the site of the attack are ongoing.

“There are probably still people under the rubble of the building,” they wrote.

You can read more about the strike here.

Russia will respond to Ukraine‘s strike that used US-made ATACMS missiles against Russian territory, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said on Thursday.

Russia said on Wednesday that Ukraine had struck a military airfield on the Azov Sea with six US-made ATACMS ballistic missiles, a move that could prompt Moscow to launch another experimental intermediate-range hypersonic missile at Ukraine.

Finland’s ministry of defence has said it has blocked seven real estate transactions involving two Russian buyers on grounds that allowing the acquisitions to take place could threaten national security.

Helsinki has sought for some time to limit Russian citizens’ purchase of property near strategic locations based on existing regulations, blocking three transactions in October 2023 and another three in January this year.

“The Ministry of Defence carefully investigates the backgrounds of every real estate buyer coming from outside the EU and EEA,” Defence Minister Antti Hakkanen said in a statement, referring to the European Union and the European Economic Area which also includes Norway, Iceland and Liechtenstein.

“Protecting our national security is particularly important in the current security situation,” he added.

The latest decisions concern one property in Pargas on the coast of southern Finland and five properties in Kokemaki in the southwestern part of the country, the ministry said in a statement.

The two people making the transactions were both private individuals with Russian citizenship, it added.

Finland’s government in September proposed to ban most Russian citizens from buying property in the country.

Relations between Finland and neighbouring Russia have soured since Moscow’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, prompting Helsinki to join the NATO military alliance after decades of non-alignment.

Ukrainian military chief Oleksandr Syrskyi has visited the area of Pokrovsk, in eastern Ukraine, amid fears that Russian forces are pushing towards its outskirts.

The city of Pokrovsk is a linchpin of the wider Donetsk region’s defences and Russian troops have spent months pushing towards it, taking almost 400 square miles since the fall of the key city of Avdiivka to the southeast in February. This attack accelerated over the summer, though at great cost in personnel to the Russians.

DeepState, a Ukrainian war tracker, puts Russian forces now within just two miles of the city.

Mr Syrskryi described the battles in Pokrovsk as “extremely tough”, adding that Russian forces were “prevailing”.

“The Russian occupiers are throwing forward all available forces, trying to break through the defence of our troops,” he wrote on the Telegram messenger.

Russian troops destroyed or captured several Ukrainian positions near the eastern city of Pokrovsk, Kyiv’s military has said, as Moscow bears down on the strategic logistics hub that is home to a unique Ukrainian coking mine.

After months of accelerating advances towards Pokrovsk, Moscow’s forces are now as close as 3 kilometres (1.9 miles) from the southern outskirts of the city, according to Ukraine‘s DeepState, which maps the front lines using open sources.

“As a result of prolonged clashes, two of our positions were destroyed, one was lost. Currently, measures are being taken to restore positions,” Nazar Voloshyn, Ukraine‘s military spokesman for the eastern front, said in televised comments.

Pokrovsk, situated about 18 kilometres (11 miles) from the boundary of Ukraine‘s Donetsk and Dnipropetrovsk regions, has for months been the area of the fiercest battles in Russia’s 33-month-old full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

In October and November, the Russian military advanced towards the city at its fastest rate since the early months of the war, analysts said. Ukraine, which has been on the back foot since its failed 2023 counteroffensive, says Russia has been sustaining some of its heaviest losses of the war to date.