Ukraine-Russia war – live: Mourners visit dead Wagner chief Prigozhin’s grave as Moscow threatens further annex

Close to 250 of Vladimir Putin’s soldiers have been killed or injured in southern Ukraine in the past 24 hours, a Ukrainian military commander said.

Ukraine’s authorities said the casualties occurred on Saturday in Tavria, a village in southern Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhia, just 23km from the major town of Tokmak, where Ukrainian forces are looking to advance for a strategic territorial advantage.

“Over the last day, the enemy lost 248 people (84 dead, 163 wounded and one captured),” Brigadier General Oleksandr Tarnavskyi, who is in-charge of the strategic and operational group of forces in Tavriia, said in his Telegram channel on Sunday.

Arpan Rai reports:

Congressional supporters of Ukraine say they won’t give up after a bill to keep the federal government open excluded Joe Biden’s request to provide more security assistance to the war-torn nation.

Still, many lawmakers acknowledge that winning approval for Ukraine assistance in Congress is growing more difficult as the war between Russia and Ukraine grinds on. Republican resistance to the aid has been gaining momentum in the halls of Congress.

Voting in the House this past week pointed to the potential trouble ahead. Nearly half of House Republicans voted to strip $300m from a defence spending bill to train Ukrainian soldiers and purchase weapons. The money later was approved separately, but opponents of Ukraine support celebrated their growing numbers.

Then on Saturday, House speaker Kevin McCarthy omitted additional Ukraine aid from a measure to keep the government running until 17 November. In doing so, he closed the door on a Senate package that would have funnelled $6bn to Ukraine, roughly a third of what has been requested by the White House.

Both the House and Senate overwhelmingly approved the stopgap measure, with members of both parties abandoning the increased aid for Ukraine in favour of avoiding a costly government shutdown.

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The protesters, who came from all over the country to participate in the demonstration dubbed ‘March of a Million Hearts’, was led by opposition leader and former prime minister Donald Tusk against Poland’s ruling Law and Justice (PiS) party.

There are no immediate plans to deploy military instructors to Ukraine, British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, rowing back from comments by his defence minister who had suggested troops could carry out training in the country.

To date, Britain and its allies have avoided a formal military presence in Ukraine to reduce the risk of a direct conflict with Russia.

British defence minister Grant Shapps, who was appointed to the role last month, said in an interview with The Sunday Telegraph newspaper that he wanted to deploy military instructors to Ukraine, in addition to training Ukrainian armed forces in Britain or other Western countries.

Hours after that interview was published, Sunak said there were no immediate plans to send British troops to Ukraine.

"What the defence secretary was saying was that it might well be possible one day in the future for us to do some of that training in Ukraine," Sunak told reporters at the start of the governing Conservative Party’s annual conference in Manchester.

"But that’s something for the long term, not the here and now. There are no British soldiers that will be sent to fight in the current conflict."

A Ukrainian drone might have struck a helicopter base in Russia’s Sochi, according to reports. This strike came after social video video showed a drone hitting an aircraft factory in Smolensk.

Britain will send RAF Typhoon jets to Poland, Defence Minister Grant Shapps said. The typhoo is an “agile multi-role combat aircraft” used for air policing, peace support and high-intensity conflict, according to the RAF.

European Union foreign policy chief Josep Borrell said during a visit to Kyiv on Sunday that Ukraine needed more military aid and he promised ongoing EU support.

“Ukraine needs more capabilities & needs them faster,” he said in a statement posted on X, formerly

Twitter. He said he had discussed “continuous EU military assistance” during his first in-person meeting with Defence Minister Rustem Umerov.

“We are preparing long-term security commitments for Ukraine,” Borrell added.

A Russian propagandist called for a ‘nuclear ultimatum’ after she claimed a Ukrainian drone fell in front of her family home.

“Tonight, an attack drone fell right in front of our family home in Adler, where I and my mother grew up, and where my relatives and their small children still live,” Margarita Simonyan said.

“The goals are ever further away, the stakes are ever higher, the nuclear ultimatum becomes increasingly uncontested.”